Abstract
Robotics has made remarkable progress. This paper overviews current robot research from a cognitive science perspective, and then discuss the possibility of using a mobile robot for a theory construction in spatial cognition. As a concrete case study, the paper presents our recent attempt to model infant's spatial development. In this modeling we address the following questions: (1) How does locomotion experience promote spatial development? (2) What is the relationship between body growth and spatial development? To explore these issues, we focus on the idea of mental tracking: the ability to update spatial relations between self and object without real (visual) tracking during the locomotion. We modeled the development of mental tracking as a learning task for a simulated robot, and conducted experiments simulating an infant's ability at locomotion.
