Synchronisation in anticipative sensory-motor schemes

Assimilation schemes Assimilation schemes have been introduced by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, as dynamical structures assimilating the agent's environment (Piaget, 1952). In Piaget's theory, schemes are operating at all levels of an agent's life, from the biological levels where, for example, cells assimilate the nutrients around them in order to preserve their own structure, to the most abstract levels of cognition, where schemes act as theories able to assimilate facts and data. When assimilating a situation, a scheme also accommodates to it, in order to preserve its assimilation activity. Such accommodation may lead to the creation of newly derived assimilating schemes, a framework for learning. Assimilation schemes are enactive processes, as being inherently sensory-motor and autopoietic. In their simplest form, they are cycles of action/anticipation elements; the action part of such elements are used to operate on the situation, but also to test whether the situation is as it seems to be, or not. In that sense, Piaget's schemes are a particular case of the interactivist processes introduced by Bickhard (1995, 1999). Interactivist processes are using action/anticipation pathways to interact with the situation, in a way similar to Piaget schemes. The fundamental interactivist knowledge is not composed of explicit encodings; on the contrary, it is with its implicit properties that a situation will be categorized and interacted with in an adapted way. Bickhard has shown (Bickhard, 1995) that this approach dissolves the 'symbol grounding problem', and that all non-interactive frameworks are doomed to failure as regards to this problem : without interactive feedback, a representation has no real epistemic contact to reality. To take an example again, the perception of a chair is not the passive recognition of a set of structural features; instead it is the possibility of sitting on it, related to several complex sensory-motor schemes used in sitting activities. In that sense, it is similar to a Gibsonian perception (Gibson, 1979), where the chair 'affords ' the sitting process. Piaget/interactivist schemes are inherently temporal, since they are composed of sensory-motor elements which are synchronized on temporally extended processes of the environment. For example when driving, the effects of a steering-wheel move can only be evaluated as time goes on. Another important aspect of Piaget/interactivist schemes is that the degree to which they assimilate a situation provides an internal error criterion for the agent itself, a mandatory ingredient for unsupervised learning.