Emergently Developed Cognitive Architectures: Testing by Developmental Robotics

How useful are bio-developmental approaches for understanding how cognitive capabilities are acquired? One bio-developmental hypothesis is that human cognition unfolds with maturation as a massive collection of adaptive cognitive “capabilities” expressing pre-structured genetic programs. But the seeming plasticity of human cognition argues against simple formulations of innately-specified anatomical & functional processing system composed of specialized computational modules. One alternative is an architecture using domain-specific predispositions and general learning mechanisms to construct modules from interactions. This lets them emerge and unfold in a self- organized fashion as part of developmental experience. The result is a more dynamic, complex cognitive architecture explaining such things as the drive for sensorimotor control in infants, which is combines the generation of exploratory movements constrained by the interaction of ability and environment followed by the selection and maintenance of adaptive movement patterns (Schlesinger et al. 2000). Such findings are consistent with a view that ontogenetic processes are co-important (and co-dependent) with gene- based evolutionary processes for behavior and cognition.