Successive Developmental Levels of Autobiographical Memory for Learning Through Social Interaction

A developing cognitive system will ideally acquire knowledge of its interaction in the world, and will be able to use that knowledge to construct a scaffolding for progressively structured levels of behavior. The current research implements and tests an autobiographical memory system by which a humanoid robot, the iCub, can accumulate its experience in interacting with humans, and extract regularities that characterize this experience. This knowledge is then used in order to form composite representations of common experiences. We first apply this to the development of knowledge of spatial locations, and relations between objects in space. We then demonstrate how this can be extended to temporal relations between events, including “before” and “after,” which structure the occurrence of events in time. In the system, after extended sessions of interaction with a human, the resulting accumulated experience is processed in an offline manner, in a form of consolidation, during which common elements of different experiences are generalized in order to generate new meanings. These learned meanings then form the basis for simple behaviors that, when encoded in the autobiographical memory, can form the basis for memories of shared experiences with the human, and which can then be reused as a form of game playing or shared plan execution.