Developing Object Understanding through Schema Generalisation

Psychologists report that infants rely on shape rather than colour for object recognition, differentiation and generalisation for both verbal and non-verbal tasks. In this paper we propose a mechanism for object generalisation, based on inductive inference and differentiation using visual along with non-visual information obtained through the manipulation of various objects. Experiments are conducted using a simple simulator to show the dependence of the generalisation on shape versus on colour. Results show that the mechanism creates complete generalisations for objects of different shapes and partial generalisation for objects of the same shape.