The Alignment Paradigm for Modeling the Self

Overview & Synopsis

We propose to develop the notion of Alignment as one general design principle to understand how to model the Self. Alignment encompasses the notions of temporal contingency detection between sensors and motors to calibrate the self, the spatial alignment between sensors of different reference frames to represent the physical limits of the body for ego-centered representation and memory alignment as well behind old and new memories important for the autobiographical self. Behind this concept of alignment we identified three complementary neural mechanisms that may serve to achieve this autonomous construction , namely spike timing-depedent plasticity, gain-modulation and predictive coding. We review several robotic researches performed to answer this question in this perspective.