Mapping the self: infants, robots, and modeling @ ICDL-Epirob2019

Full day workshop @ the 9th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics, August 19, 2019, Oslo, Norway.

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• Call for Contributions

Organizers:

• Daniela Corbetta (Univ of Tennessee, USA)
• Matej Hoffmann (Prague, Czech Republic)
• Jeffrey Lockman (New Orleans, USA)
• Verena Hafner (Berlin, Germany)

Description:

Our bodies constitute the interface between our mind and the surrounding world. To interact effectively with the world, babies and robots need to discover the different parts of their bodies, and their physical and mechanical properties. They need to know where their limbs are in space, how far they can extend, how they work, and what range of actions they can achieve with them. Such body representations are essential for developing a sense of the self and for defining the limits of the peripersonal space. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers in the fields of developmental psychology, developmental robotics, embodied cognition, body mapping, and computational modeling to create a productive, collaborative, and multidisciplinary forum from which different facets of these fundamental processes linked to body mapping and mapping the self will be explored. The workshop will be organized around three general themes with specific speakers and experts in each area:

1. Body mapping: This theme will group developmental and learning studies in infants, adults, and robots on self-touch, self-exploration of the body, self-localization, and haptic perception to understand how the mapping of the self forms.
2. Defining the peripersonal space: This theme will examine the range and conditions through which our peripersonal space develops, is being perceived, and being modulated through interactions with objects, people, and events in our daily surroundings. This theme will contrast infant, children, and adult studies as well as computational models.
3. Sense of self and body ownership: This third theme will explore how our brain builds a map and sense of ownership of objects as extensions of our own body. Studies and models on tool use learning, prostheses mastery, including studies on the rubber hand illusion will provide a framework to understand how perception and action of inanimate objects can be experienced as functional extensions of our body and self.

Target audience:

Cognitive psychologists, developmental psychologists, developmental roboticists, embodied cognition, cognitive neuroscience, researchers on the self, computational modeling, machine learning