A Case Study of Developmental Robotics in Understanding “Object Permanence”

In this paper, a biologically inspired computational model is proposed and implemented on a robot to study one of the most fundamental and controversial issues in cognitive science – “Object Permanence.” Because of the world-knowledgefree design and the developmental learning ability of this model, we are able to analyze the robot’s behavior based on its perceptual development through different experiences. Our experimental result shows consistency with prior researches on human infants, which not only sheds light on the highly controversial issue of object permanence, but also demonstrates how biologically inspired developmental models can potentially develop intelligent machines and verify computational modeling that has been established in cognitive science.