Acquiring multimodal representation of the face and arm

Both body and visuo-spatial representations are supposed to be gradually acquired during the developmental process as described in cognitive and brain sciences. A typical example is face representation in a neuron (found in the adjacent ventral intraparietal (in short, VIP) area) of which the function is not only to code for the location of visual stimuli in the head-centered reference frame but also to connect visual sensation with tactile sensation. This talk presents a model that enables a robot to acquire such representation. The proprioception of arm posture is utilized as reference data through the ”hand regard behavior”, that is, the robot moves its hand in front of its face, and self organizing map (SOM) and Hebbian learning methods are applied. The simulation results and discussions on the limitation of the current model and future issues will be presented.

About the speaker :  Sawa Fuke is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Adaptive Machine Systems, Graduate School of Engineering,  Osaka univ and will receive her Ph.D. in March. Her research interest are body image, spatial perception using visual information, and sensor fusion.