This book addresses the central role played by development in cognition.
The focus is on applying our knowledge of development in natural
cognitive systems, specifically human infants, to the problem of
creating artificial cognitive systems in the guise of humanoid robots.
The approach is founded on the three-fold premise that (a) cognition is
the process by which an autonomous self-governing agent acts effectively
in the world in which it is embedded, (b) the dual purpose of cognition
is to increase the agent's repertoire of effective actions and its power
to anticipate the need for future actions and their outcomes, and (c)
development plays an essential role in the realization of these
cognitive capabilities. Our goal in this book is to identify the key
design principles for cognitive development. We do this by bringing
together insights from four areas: enactive cognitive science,
developmental psychology, neurophysiology, and computational modelling.
This results in roadmap comprising a set of forty-three guidelines for
the design of a cognitive architecture and its deployment in a humanoid
robot. The book includes a case study based on the iCub, an open-systems
humanoid robot which has been designed specifically as a common platform
for research on embodied cognitive systems .