Biography

Kevin O’Regan is ex-director of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS, Université Paris Descartes. After early work on eye movements in reading, he was led to question established notions of the nature of visual perception, and to discover, with collaborators, the phenomenon of “change blindness”. In 2011 he published a book with Oxford University Press: “Why red doesn’t sound like a bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness”. In 2013 he obtained a five-year Advanced ERC grant to explore his “sensorimotor” approach to consciousness in relation to sensory substitution, pain, colour, space perception, developmental psychology and robotics.

Abstract

Baby Challenges for robotic models of body acquisition and tool use

Human infants seem at first to be as stupid, if not more stupid, than some birds and monkeys in their ability to manipulate objects, solve problems and use tools. But they somehow overcome their deficiencies and blossom into much more impressive problem solvers and tool users than animals. What accounts for this difference? Current robotic approaches to open-ended learning propose concepts like Intrinsic Motivation to guide exploration. If such a mechanism is at work both in humans and animals, what can explain the superiority of humans?

I will discuss a variety of examples of our work on infant acquisition of body knowledge and tool use in the light of current robotic work on open-ended learning and intrinsic motivation.