Object permanence: results from developmental robotics

Object permanence is an important theoretical construct that has been researched with infants. For the last twenty years, a debate as whether object permanence is an innate conceptual knowledge or a gradually constructed perceptual capability has been raised. However, the lack of autonomous computational models leaves this issue still widely open. A neurologically inspired computational model based on priming is proposed and tested on our developmental SAIL robot. By nurturing the robot baby with different living experiences, we conduct the well-known "drawbridge" experiment on eleven experience-tuned "brains". The implication of our experimental results is informative, which not only sheds light on the controversial issue of object permanence, but might produce long lasting effects on the way AI community approaches highly perceptual machines.