Contingency perception and agency measure in visuo-motor spiking neural networks

Abstract—Agency is the sense that I am the cause or author of a movement. Babies develop early this feeling by perceiving the contingency between afferent (sensor) and efferent (motor) infor-mation. A comparator model is hypothesized to be associated with many brain regions to monitor and simulate the concordance be-tween self-produced actions and their consequences. In this paper, we propose that the biological mechanism of spike timing-depen-dent plasticity, that synchronizes the neural dynamics almost ev-erywhere in the central nervous system, constitutes the perfect al-gorithm to detect contingency in sensorimotor networks. The co-herence or the dissonance in the sensorimotor information flow im-parts then the agency level. In a head-neck-eyes robot, we replicate three developmental experiments illustrating how particular per-ceptual experiences can modulate the overall level of agency inside the system; i.e., 1) by adding a delay between proprioceptive and visual feedback information, 2) by facing a mirror, and 3) a person. We show that the system learns to discriminate animated objects (self-image and other persons) from other type of stimuli. This sug-gests a basic stage representing the self in relation to others from low-level sensorimotor processes. We discuss then the relevance of our findings with neurobiological evidences and development psy-chological observations for developmental robots. Index Terms—Contingency detection, self-agency, sensorimotor integration, spiking neural networks