Preliminary Evidence That Conceptual Structure Can Be Learned by Interacting with an Environment

Contents

Recent developments in philosophy, linguistics, developmental psychology and artificial intelligence make it possible to envision a developmental path for an artificial agent, grounded in activity-based sensorimotor representations. This paper describes how Neo, an artificial agent, learns concepts by interacting with its simulated environment. Relatively little prior structure is required to learn fairly accurate representations of objects, activities, locations and other aspects of Neo’s experience. We show how classes (categories) can be abstracted from these representations.