How Does a Child Learn That It Can Change the World Around It? 

A Humanoid Robot Offers New Answers

Citation:  Spisak, J., Tcaci Popescu, S., Rustler, L., Wermter, S., O’Regan, J. K. and Hoffmann, M. (2026), 'Robot in a crib: How a playing robot helps us understand sensorimotor contingency learning', Science Robotics 11(117), eaed4106.  

Link to article @ Science Robotics: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aed4106 

Link to full text: e-print @ science.org

CTU news / FEE CTU news  /  FEE CTU news (Czech) / Press release (in Czech)

Video:  See  Movie 1 @ https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aed4106

Data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21238114

Code: https://github.com/Humanoids-CTU/Robot-in-a-crib.git  

How does a young child learn that moving its hand can change the world around it? And what happens in the brain during this process? An international team of researchers from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Universität Hamburg and Université Paris Cité explored these questions using the humanoid robot iCub. The results of their experiments, which offer a new perspective on the mechanisms of early learning, have now been published in Science Robotics, the world’s leading scientific journal in the field of robotics.

We built on the classic work of American psychologist Carolyn Rovee-Collier. In an experiment known as the “mobile paradigm,” an infant lies in a crib with one of its limbs connected to a suspended mobile. When the child moves that limb, the mobile moves as well. Gradually, the child discovers that its own movement has caused the change, establishing one of the fundamental relationships between an action and its consequence.

Here we replaced the infant with the humanoid robot iCub and created a computational model for it – a simplified “artificial brain.” The robot was not told in advance which limb was connected to the mobile or exactly how its movements would affect the environment. It had to discover these relationships gradually through its own movements and their consequences.

Photo credits: Petr Neugebauer, FEL ČVUT.