Doing as you're told: a cognitive robot model of motor imagery, action and verbal instruction.

The processes behind the human ability to create mental images of events and experiences have recently become an object of renewed interest in cognitive science. Understanding the tight relationship that exists between mental imagery and motor activities (i.e. how images in the mind can influence movements and motor skills) has also become a topic of interest and is of particular importance in domains in which improving those skills is crucial for obtaining better performance, such as in sports and rehabilitation. In this paper, using an embodied cognition approach and a cognitive robotics platform, we introduce initial results of an ongoing study that explores the impact linguistic stimuli could have in processes of mental imagery practice and subsequent motor execution and performance. Preliminary results show that the robot used, is able to “imagine” or “mentally” recall and accurately execute movements learned in previous training phases, strictly on the basis of the verbal commands issued. We believe these early results to be encouraging and that they call for deeper studies on the computational modeling of motor imagery and its relations with language by means of the materials and methods presented in this paper.