Connectionists: [journals] CfP: Frontiers Special Issue "Modeling Play in Early Infant Development"

[Pierre-Yves Oudeyer]

[Apologies for multiple postings of this announcement]

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Frontiers Special Issue:
Modeling Play in Early Infant Development
Call for Participation
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Webpage:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/5527/modeling-play-in-early-infant-development

Can we develop computers or robots that play and develop like children
or animals? Approaches to this question involves the elaboration and
study of computational models of infant play with the perspective of two
complementary disciplines. Firstly, developmental psychology benefits
from such models to formulate theories and conjectures of infant play
which can be tested and evaluated through experimental studies.
Secondly, the new field of developmental robotics looks toward infant
development for inspiration, data, and guidance, in order to build
models of learning that may be useful both for better understanding of
human development and for engineering autonomous learning in robots and
other systems.

The aim of this Frontiers Research Topic is to present international
state-of-the-art research from naturalistic or experimental infant
studies and computational/robot modelling, on early infant play
behaviour. The focus will be on the very earliest forms of play, because
this is concurrent with increasing perception and understanding of the
“physics of the world”, e.g. perceptions of objects, causality, and
interactions. Many interesting questions arise: for example:
- How does play emerge and what is its relation to motor babbling?
- How does play relate to object understanding and world knowledge?
- How does intrinsically motived self-generation of goals relate to
future extrinsically motivated goal generation and goal attribution?
- How far can the world be explored through the paradigm of play?
- How can we best understand more about infant cognition from
modelling these concepts on robots?

Within this inter-disciplinary framework, we would like to invite
authors to submit original research for topics including, but not
limited to:
- Computational modelling of relevant psychological experiments
- Experimental or theoretical studies of infant or animal development
- Early infant play behaviour
- Computational models of play behaviour
- Intrinsically motivated self-generation of goals
- Development of object understanding through play

Submission Deadlines:
14 April 2017 Abstract
13 October 2017 Manuscript

Contributing authors will have the following choice of journals to
submit their manuscript to, given the scope of their contribution:
- Frontiers in Neurorobotics
- Frontiers in Developmental Psychology

Editors
- Prof. Mark H. Lee, Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
- Dr Patricia Shaw, Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
- Dr Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
- Dr Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Institut national de recherche en
informatique et en automatique (INRIA), Talence, France
- Prof. Karen E. Adolph, New York University, New York, USA
- Prof. Qiang Shen, Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK
- Dr Jill Popp, Lego Foundation, Denmark

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