Using habituation as a simple and fundamental learning mechanism in an embodied artificial agent

Tristan Gillard, Jeremy Fix, Alain Dutech

Abstract: Habituation, a non-associative learning widely observed across phylogeny, is fundamental for adaptation and, thus, survival of living organisms. This paper investigates the main characteristics of habituation in order to present three new computational models inspired by habituation. We develop these models as part of the Iterant Deformable Sensorimotor Medium (IDSM), a recently developed abstract model of behavior formation. The characteristics of these models are studied and analyzed. Our long-term objective is to research new unsupervised learning mechanisms for artificial learning agents.