Abstract
By the onset of reaching, young infants are already able to coordinate vision of a target with the felt position of their arm [7]. How is this coordination achieved? In order to investigate the hypothesis that infants learn to link vision and proprioception via the sense of touch, we implemented a recent computational model of reaching [22]. The model employs a genetic algorithm as a proxy for sensorimotor development in young infants. The three principal findings of our simulations were that tactile perception: (1) facilitates learning to coordinate vision and proprioception, (2) promotes an efficient reaching strategy, and (3) accelerates the remapping of vision and proprioception after perturbation of the multimodal map. Follow-up analyses of the model provide additional support for our hypothesis, and suggest that touch helps to coordinate vision and proprioception by providing a third, correlated information channel.
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Schlesinger, M., Parisi, D. (2001). Coordinating Multiple Sensory Modalities While Learning to Reach. In: French, R.M., Sougné, J.P. (eds) Connectionist Models of Learning, Development and Evolution. Perspectives in Neural Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0281-6_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-0281-6_12
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