Learning About the Self and Others Through Contingency

Knowledge of the time delay between a robotic action and the reaction in the environment can be used to perform selfrecognition and possibly identify other social agents in the environment as well. We describe a self-recognition system that uses timing information to identify self-generated motion and describe how this method might be extended to identify nonmoving parts of the robot. In addition, we show that our means of self-recognition can be applied to mirror self-recognition. Finally, we describe our plans to use contingency to identify other agents in the environment, using a method similar to that employed for self-recognition.