Talk

• Date: Thursday, November 4th
• Time: 13:30-14:30
• Venue: Multimedia Conference Room (next to TV Conf Room)
• Speaker: Luc Berthouze, Ph.D. (http://staff.aist.go.jp/luc.berthouze/) Neuroscience Research Institute (AIST, Tsukuba)
• Title: Understanding human motor skill acquisition: Developmental robotics and brain imaging
• Abstract:
  In this talk, I will report on two projects aiming at elucidating mechanisms underlying the acquisition of motor skills in humans. In the first part, I will discuss our synthetic approach to understanding the development of early locomotor skills in young infants. I will describe how we use a small humanoid robot to replicate a longitudinal study by Goldfield on infants learning to bounce in a Jolly Jumper. I will elaborate on two important phases in the acquisition of the skill -- assembly phase and tuning phase -- and will discuss our current model and results. In the second part, I will describe our project on learning to speechread. Learning to speechread is a very interesting task because it involves learning from indirect feedback. I will present the design and results of our brain imaging (fMRI) study and will discuss our current computational model. This model, which has now been successfully tested on deferred head movement imitation, is aimed to implement critical components of a general imitation mechanism.