Overlapping Waves in Tool Use Development: a Curiosity-Driven Computational Model
Résumé
The development of tool use in children is a key
question for the understanding of the development of human
cognition. Several authors have studied it to investigate how
children explore, evaluate and select alternative strategies for
solving problems. In particular, Siegler has used this domain
to develop the overlapping waves theory that characterizes how
infants continue to explore alternative strategies to solve a par-
ticular problem, even when one is currently better than others.
In computational models of strategy selection for the problem
of integer addition, Shrager and Siegler proposed a mechanism
that maintains the concurrent exploration of alternative strategies
with use frequencies that are proportional to their performance
for solving a particular problem. This mechanism was also used
by Chen and Siegler to interpret an experiment with 1.5- and
2.5-year-olds that had to retrieve an out-of-reach toy, and where
they could use one of several available strategies that included
leaning forward to grasp a toy with the hand or using a tool
to retrieve the toy. In this paper, we use this domain of tool
use discovery to consider other mechanisms of strategy selection
and evaluation. In particular, we present models of curiosity-
driven exploration, where strategies are explored according to
the learning progress/information gain they provide (as opposed
to their current efficiency to actually solve the problem). In these
models, we define a curiosity-driven agent learning a hierarchy
of different sensorimotor models in a simple 2D setup with a
robotic arm, a stick and a toy. In a first phase, the agent learns
from scratch how to use its robotic arm to control the tool and
to catch the toy, and in a second phase with the same learning
mechanisms, the agent has to solve three problems where the toy
can only be reached with the tool. We show that agents choosing
strategies based on a learning progress measure also display
overlapping waves of behavior compatible with the one observed
in infants, and we suggest that curiosity-driven exploration could
be at play in Chen and Siegler’s experiment, and more generally
in tool use discovery.
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