Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research “Constructive Developmental Science Based on Understanding the Process from Neuro-Dynamics to Social Interaction”
(Principal Investigator: Minoru Asada, Period: 2012.05-2017.03)
How the microscopic neural activity is reflected in the human behaviors is a big mystery shared by many different disciplines. Medical and neuroscience have tried to explain the microscopic structure inside the brain but have not much focused on the macroscopic structure of social interaction. Contrarily, cognitive science and developmental psychology mainly observe human behaviors, and therefore it is difficult to understand the internal mechanism. We have been advocating Cognitive Developmental Robotics (CDR) which aims to provide new understanding how human’s higher cognitive functions develop by means of synthetic approaches that developmentally construct cognitive functions.
In this project, we focus on an issue of self/other cognition, based on CDR approaches: a large scale simulation of brain development with realistic body, imaging studies for real-time interaction, building a realistic child robot with muscle-skeleton system, behavioral experiments with robot platforms, and then establishment of constructive developmental science.