“Mirroring”: A Solution for the Development of Cognitive Skills

In this work, we study the “mirroring” in the early stages of learning in the context of autonomous system. We propose three experiences that highlight how imitation, facial expressions recognition and social referencing can emerge from a robotic architecture that is not able to distinguish between self and other. Three results are discussed: (1) the “ambiguity” of perception produces the emergence of simple gestural imitation in a system that has previously learned to associate its own perceptions; (2) facial expressions recognition emerges from a similar architecture, the human plays the role of mirror (social mirroring) through an imitative game; then by extension; (3) the development of social referencing incorporates the ability to recognize, understand, respond to and regulate its behavior in response to human’s emotional expression (double mirroring). This work is based on two mechanisms: (1) a sensorimotor architecture based on associative mechanisms allowing to develop a perception as a set of dynamic attractors; (2) mirroring mechanism allowing the robot to associate what it does with what it sees. We will show that these two assumptions are sufficient to build a sensorimotor architecture that is able to develop cognitive abilities increasingly complex.