physical cognition & problem solving workshop 2011

Problem-solving by explorationZoe Demery

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Many thanks to...

Jackie Chappell

Rustam StolkinJeremy Wyatt

Nick HawesJon Rowe

Aaron Sloman

Vero Rios

Susannah Thorpe

Graham Martin

Sarah BeckIan Apperly

Alan Wing (SyMoN)

- Jack-in-the-Box Nursery- Little Hippos Nursery- Nelson Junior & Infant School

Jolyon Troscianko Abi Phillips Emma Tecwyn

What is exploration?

Exploratory play can be defined as perceptual and motor interactions with objects,

apparently lacking in any immediate benefit or function, except to gather knowledge about

the surrounding environment and its affordances, sometimes in parallel with problem-solving by goal-directed action.

Why bother studying it?

• Focus on HOW not what• Many low & high level

learning mechanisms suggested – but how are these supported?

• Little systematic study – what there is, is anthropocentric

Borst et al. (2009), Max-Planck Institute for Neurobiology: http://www.physorg.com/news168256071.htmlPerone, S., Madole, K. L., Ross-Sheehy, S., Carey, M., & Oakes, L. M. (2008). The relation between infants'™ activity with objects and attention to object appearance. Developmental Psychology, 44(5), 1242-8.

• How do individuals across species process and manipulate the vast complexity of their surrounding environment?

http://www.physorg.com/news168256071.html

Which angle to study it from?

Demery, Z. P., Chappell, J., & Martin, G. R. (2011). Vision, touch and object manipulation in Senegal parrots Poicephalus senegalus. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 1–8. doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.0374

Sensory Exploration: a bird's perspective

Demery, Z., Rios, V. E. A., Sloman, A., Wyatt, J., & Chappell, J. (2010). Construct to Understand : Learning through Exploration. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on AI-Inspired Biology (pp. 59–61). Presented at the Proceedings of the International Symposium on AI-Inspired Biology.Chappell, J., Demery, Z. P., Arriola-Rios, V., & Sloman, A. (2011). How to build an information gathering and processing system: lessons from naturally and artificially intelligent systems. Behavioural Processes, 1–20.

Cognitive Exploration: a robot's perspective

Forming hypotheses

Testing hypotheses

Extending & refining hypotheses


Colella, V., Klopfer, E., & Resnick, M. (2001). Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo. Teachers College Press.

Behavioural Exploration: a child's perspective

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Pull at the ball from the side to retrieve it

Push the ball from the side for it to roll out

Push the ball from the top for it to roll out

Pull the ball from the top to retrieve it


Control Perceptual Between-category Within-category0

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Repeated ANOVA: ** = p <.001 * = p < .01



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Conclusion

• Looking at exploration reveals the underlying behavioural strategies different individuals may use to gather information and attempt to solve different problems

• Must look at all aspects to a problem and therefore use multiple techniques from different fields

• Parrot visual fields & bill tip organ• Using robots & simulations to test Three-Stage Theory /

underlying cognition• Behavioural tests with children for saliency of

functional/perceptual cues

Any questions?

BBSRC-funded 4yr PhD on...supervised by JC...but many thanks also to...

SyMoN = sensory motor neuroscience group

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What is exploration?

Exploratory play can be defined as perceptual and motor interactions with objects,

apparently lacking in any immediate benefit or function, except to gather knowledge about

the surrounding environment and its affordances, sometimes in parallel with problem-solving by goal-directed action.

- a lot of debate BUT for the sake of this talk, I define exploration or 'exploratory play/learning' to be...

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Why bother studying it?

• Focus on HOW not what• Many low & high level

learning mechanisms suggested – but how are these supported?

• Little systematic study – what there is, is anthropocentric

Borst et al. (2009), Max-Planck Institute for Neurobiology: http://www.physorg.com/news168256071.htmlPerone, S., Madole, K. L., Ross-Sheehy, S., Carey, M., & Oakes, L. M. (2008). The relation between infants'™ activity with objects and attention to object appearance. Developmental Psychology, 44(5), 1242-8.

• How do individuals across species process and manipulate the vast complexity of their surrounding environment?

• While hugely revealingly, animal cognition research has focussed on what capacities of different species are, little on HOW they actually do it (i.e. performance not the underlying processes).• Many suggested different learning mechs though like associative/trial&error/probabilistic/Bayes/causal reasoning >>but again not HOW these supported behaviourally. >>Just considered each in isolation too rather than in possible parallel depending on the type of problem the individual faces.>>Like to suggest that these could occur in combination, but this will not take focus of this talk.• Largest focus on exploration has been in human developmental psychology from Piaget's constructivism.But while Piaget's view that children learn through play widely accepted but actually little detail or systematic supporting evidence (e.g. Laura Schulz et al.). Lots of descriptive, qualitative data, which is great but can only go so far.

- Not always a linear process >>can feedback on each other - In this talk, going to consider each of these aspects, but using techniques from different fields & consider different types of individuals to try & provide a fuller picture. Just gives a flavour though of such a huge area – know I haven't covered the molecular/neuroscience sides for example!

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• JJ & EJ Gib eco approach (for humans) – we perceive the object world and its different props (what it 'affords' for actions) by our sensory & perceptual systems detecting invariant info. e.g. light picked up by eyes not random, but reflects how scene organised >>we suggest similar for exploration, sensitive to particular stimuli?• Parrots exceptional among birds for their high exploratory tendencies, neophilia throughout their lives and learning abilities (as described by Jayden previously & Alice later on in this workshop) BUT ALSO their dextrous manipulatory abilities.•We found that the visual fields of Senegal parrots are unlike those described hitherto in any other bird species, with both a relatively broad frontal binocular field and a near comprehensive field of view around the head BUT blind from just below the bill tip.

● >>Think this is mainly due to touch receptors at the bill tip & along the inner ventral edges of the hard keratin of the bill, as well as in the fleshy tongue (not described since Goujon 1869!), WHICH allows the visual field to shift up&back presumably for greater detection of threats from conspecifics & predators.

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• This led us to consider how this affects their exploratory behaviour, or whether the visual field was oriented this way because of how they climb round their environment, in using their hooked bill effectively as a third limb.•

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- Currently analysing behavioural tests to test this theory- Here a couple of crude animations to illustrate this idea.- Locomotion: Orientated in the intended direction of travel with the maximum binocular field width (forward and above the bird's head) centred on the target object of interest or the next point of contact on the supporting surface.- Exploration:

1. Put object into binocular field of view.2. Still tilting head in approach.3. Pick up (can see end of beak).4. Before exploration & play to see object's affordances & properties.

9Demery, Z., Rios, V. E. A., Sloman, A., Wyatt, J., & Chappell, J. (2010). Construct to Understand : Learning through Exploration. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on AI-Inspired Biology (pp. 59–61). Presented at the Proceedings of the International Symposium on AI-Inspired Biology.Chappell, J., Demery, Z. P., Arriola-Rios, V., & Sloman, A. (2011). How to build an information gathering and processing system: lessons from naturally and artificially intelligent systems. Behavioural Processes, 1–20.


Forming hypotheses

Testing hypotheses

Extending & refining hypotheses

- Been considering w/ Aaron, Vero & Jackie in a recent paper coming out hopefully shortly in Behav Proc, how various problems of different kinds & complexity can be addressed by different information-processing systems in different environments.

>>AI/AC overlap from different directions.- Looking at each of these levels with behavioural-cognitive tests with parrots (kaks/senegals), robots (Vero's work) and humans (explore next).- Also simulations of different behavioural tests can be compared to actual parrot behaviour to lend some sort of insight into what is going on inside their heads >>understand min. complexity.

- Exploration isn't always random but structured, selection & sensitive to particular features and salient categorical stimuli of the environment. Typically follows through 3 stages of theory formation specific to particular affordances & processes, but can be generalised to novel situations.- X Form internal reps of world by acting on it in a way suggesting probabilistic reasoning & simple trial & error learning. Also genetic predispositions to specific salient environmental features (e.g. edges/corners). Also segregate world into general categories from birth.- X Test internal theories and hard-wired phys rules by initially performing certain actions on certain objs. Test these internal hypotheses uses progressively more complex mechs like causal reasoning, so explor actions becomes less repetitive & show more flexible behaviour depending on the situation they're presented with. - X Extend & refine these hypos thru/o life by analysing them & reusing know about the world by combo into similar but new env contexts. Can also now fill in gaps abstractly by causal inferences.

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- People have been looking at these sort of problems from the invention of the computer nearly, but w/ current technology, probably only be able to answer questions posed by my first two levels – or at least first!- Distinguish btwix visual exploratory approach AND haptic exploration once w/in touching distance.- Started off wandering randomly thru env til get w/in certain dist of an obj.>>If a novel category of obj, more likely to go towards it.>>Ignores any individual objs if explored before.- NOW need to build in build in other rules, given each obj category different properties ('affordances') AND link each of these to certain exploratory actions that the parrot can perform.- corners/indents > smooth surfaces- compliance > rigid surfaces- hi > lo curvature- functional (e.g. shape/texture) > perceptual (e.g. colour) affordances- Unexpected > expected (e.g. weight/balance, or changes to what experienced before).- Generalisation??

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c

Pull at the ball from the side to retrieve it

Push the ball from the side for it to roll out

Push the ball from the top for it to roll out

Pull the ball from the top to retrieve it

- Humans have the advantage over animals to TELL us what is going on in their brains – though all they say must be taken w/ quite a large pinch of salt!- Ran a series of tasks that I believed considered each of the levels in the 3-stage theory, and also tasks that could be quite easily repeatability w/ NHA (principally parrots) for a comparison of potentially different exploratory strategies between different animal taxa that face similar environmental problems, but have quite different environmental niches. - Will consider one here that takes up second level of testing hypotheses.-

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H1: cont < percep < btwix < within>>analysed w/ repeated ANOVA. Still to analyse behavioural sequences for patterns.- YES! w/ explor dur.- Control & percep (.02) & within-cat (.001) (not btwix?)

- Btwix is sig w/ within-cat (.01) though

- No eff of within-cat & percep either.

- SO changes do produce more exploration - fine.- BUT percep cues seem to be important than originally thought.- As predicted though, invisible functional changes do produce more exploration.NB: control effect regardless of where in order.

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- Similar pattern w/ behav divs. !!INDEX FIRST!!

- YES! P<.001BUT only between control and rest, not between each other.

- Although changes do produce a greater diversity of exploratory behaviours, doesn't seem to matter what type of changes.>>so following similar exploratory strategy whatever the situation?

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Conclusion

• Looking at exploration reveals the underlying behavioural strategies different individuals may use to gather information and attempt to solve different problems

• Must look at all aspects to a problem and therefore use multiple techniques from different fields

• Parrot visual fields & bill tip organ• Using robots & simulations to test Three-Stage Theory /

underlying cognition• Behavioural tests with children for saliency of

functional/perceptual cues

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Any questions?

physical cognition & problem solving workshop 2011

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