Challenges for interactivist-constructivist robotics

The interactivist-constructivist (IC) approach offers an attractive framework for the development of intelligent robots. However, we still lack genuinely intelligent robots, capable of representing the world, in the IC sense. Here we argue that the reason for this situation is the lack of learning mechanisms that would allow the components of the robotic controller to learn constructively while they direct the robot's action in accordance to its value system. We also suggest that spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) may be such a learning mechanism that operates in the brain.