Research

Scientific Background. Studies carried out on monkeys (single neuron recordings from monkey premotor cortex [Di Pellegrino et al. 1992, Gallese et al. 1992]) and on normal human subjects (corticospinal excitability investigation by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation [Fadiga et al. 1995], brain imaging studies using functional magnetic resonance [Buccino et al. 2001] and positron emission tomography [Grafton et al. 1996]) have shown that during observation of actions performed by other individuals there is, in the observer, an activation of the motor system that simulates what would happen if the observer himself executed the observed action.
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The project will investigate the association between visual information and motor commands in the learning, representation and understanding of complex manipulative gestures. The reference scenario is that of a person performing goal driven arm/hand gestures such as pointing, scratching a body part, bringing food to the mouth etc.
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Does a mirror system exist for phonetic gestures recognition? According to the motor theory of speech perception, speech is perceived by matching articulatory gestures, which are embedded in listened words, on the listener’s motor repertoire (Lieberman 1979).
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Our main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 2 year old child: the iCub. This is an open project in many different ways: it will distribute its platform openly, it will develop software open-source, and we are open to including new partners and form collaboration worldwide.
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As infants, did we learn to perceive and produce gestures for manipulation and speech independently, or are these two learning processes linked? Should robots?
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