Cross-anchoring for binding tactile and visual sensations via unique association through self-perception

Abstract

Binding is one of the most fundamental cognitive functions, how to find the correspondence of sensations between different modalities such as vision and touch. Without a priori knowledge on this correspondence, binding is regarded to be a formidable issue for a robot since it often perceives multiple physical phenomena in its different modal sensors, therefore it should correctly match the foci of attention in different modalities that may have multiple correspondences each other. Learning the multimodal representation of the body is supposed to be the first step toward binding since the morphological constraints in self-bodyobservation would make the binding problem tractable. The multimodal sensations are expected to be constrained in perceiving own body so as to configurate the unique parts in the multiple correspondence reflecting its morphology. In this paper, we propose a method to match the foci of attention in vision and touch through the unique association by cross-anchoring different modalities. Simple experiments show the validity of the proposed method, and future issues are discussed.