The contribution of active body movement to visual development in evolutionary robots

Inspired by the pioneering work by Held and Hein (1963) on the development of kitten visuo-motor systems, we explore the role of active body movement in the developmental process of the visual system by using robots. The receptive fields in an evolved mobile robot are developed during active or passive movement with a Hebbian learning rule. In accordance to experimental observations in kittens, we show that the receptive fields and behavior of the robot developed under active condition significantly differ from those developed under passive condition. A possible explanation of this difference is derived by correlating receptive field formation and behavioral performance in the two conditions.