Interactive Perception

Human children in the first three years of life are consumed by a desire to explore and experiment with objects. They are fascinated by causal relations between objects, and quite systematically explore the way one object can influence another object. They persistently explore the properties of objects using all their senses. A child might gently tap a new toy car against the floor, listening to the sounds it makes, then try banging it loudly, and then try banging it against the soft sofa. In fact, this kind of playing around with the world, while observing the outcome of their own actions, actually contributes to babies’ ability to solve the big, deep problems of disappearance, causality, and categorization.

A child’s explanatory drive tightly couples action and perception. This coupling was observed in the 80s by the psychologist Gibson. Gibson describes perception as an active process, highly coupled with motor activities. Motor activities are necessary to perform perception and perception is geared towards detecting opportunities for motor activities. Gibson called these opportunities "affordances". The philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noe describes an "enactive" approach to perception. He argues that perception is an embodied activity that cannot be separated from motor activities and that can only succeed if the perceiver possesses an understanding of motor activities and their consequences.

Perceiving the world, making decisions, and acting to change the state of the world seem to be three independent processes. Thus, separating action and perception is intuitive. However, "enactive" approach to perception may be essential for surviving in a high-dimensional and uncertain world. Interactive Perception provides a straightforward way to formulate theories about the state of the world and directly test these theories through interactions. Interactive Perception imposes structure, limiting significantly what needs to be perceived and explained. Researchers have been following the Interactive Perception paradigm, developing robots which explain their environment by coupling actions and pereception. [Dov Katz's Thesis]