Learning to reach to own body from spontaneous self-touch using a generative model

The Emergence of Self-Awareness: Insights from Robotics

“…Indeed, from the beginning of life, somatosensory processing contributes to the learning of what constitutes one's body and its boundaries, progressively building a mental representation of the bodily self as a unique and differentiated entity in the physical world (Cangelosi & Schlesinger, 2015). Such transition is likely to be underpinned by different mechanisms, with self-touch having a prominent role (Marcel et al, 2022). Spontaneous touching to the body involves the unique experience of 'skin-on-own-skin' which is fundamentally different from the sensory experience of touching other entities.…”

“…By implication, self-touch enables for the progressive grounding of intermodal perceptual experiences centred around the body, such as tactile sensing, vision, and motor control (DiMercurio et al, 2018). Embodied computational models, directly implemented in artificial agents, might provide useful tools to test hypotheses as the behaviours derived from such efforts could be juxtaposed with empirical knowledge from infants (Hoffman et al, 2010;Marcel et al, 2022). For instance, the study of Roncone and colleagues (2014) aimed to better understand how self-touch contributes to the development of a body schema in early childhood.…”