The Object Pairing and Matching Task: Toward Montessori Tests for Robots

The Montessori method is a popular approach to education that emphasizes student-directed learning in a controlled environment. Object matching is one common task that children perform in Montessori classrooms. Matching tasks also occur quite frequently on intelligence tests for humans, which suggests that intelligence correlates with the skills required to solve these tasks. This paper describes robotic experiments with four Montessori matching tasks: sound cylinders, sound boxes, weight cylinders, and pressure cylinders. The robot grounded its representation for the twelve objects in each task in terms of the auditory and proprioceptive outcomes that they produced in response to a set of ten exploratory behaviors. The results show that based on this representation, it is possible to identify taskrelevant sensorimotor contexts (i.e., exploratory behavior and sensory modality combinations) that are useful for performing matching on a given set of objects. Furthermore, the results show that as the number of sensorimotor contexts used to perform matching increases, the robot’s ability to match the objects also increases.