NOTE: The answers are listed in random order and in their original form (i.e., spelling and grammatical errors were not corrected). The students had the option of choosing their questions on this homework (5 out of 8) so not all students chose to answer this question.


What is the difference between learning and development? If you think that they are different then give an example that makes the distinction obvious? If you think that they are the same then explain why.

• "In my opinion there should be no difference. However based on the type of work that is done under these two banners it seems to me that the difference can be significantly explained in terms of the two major philosophies underlying the learning process, namely selectionism and constructivism. Note that in this way the distinction between learning and developmental(learning) is not in terms of their ends (i.e., what is learned) which is the same in both cases but rather in terms of means (i.e., how the final result is supposed to be achieved).
  
  The constructivist approach to learning emphasizes a gradual/incremental approach where more complicated things are built on top of simpler ones and so on and so forth. The selectionstic approach on the other hand insists upon the fact that the whole point of learning is that of selecting one hypothesis h from a set of hypotheses H (or, as is the case of bayesian approaches, ranking/grading the set of hypotheses in terms of their likelihood). This can be done in whatever fashion is needed. The selectionistic approaches tend to be better at more focused problems while the constructivistic ones tend to have a wider area of applicability while sacrificing on the optimality of the solutions that they can produce.
  
  While I am a bigger fan of constructivistic approaches and somehow have the belief that in order to achieve true AI we really need this gradual approach, it does not seem that there is a definite argument for why this should be the case. After all selectionists can say that constructivism is nothing but one way of selecting a hypothesis from the set of hypotheses which is the closure of the initial (presumably innate) behaviors under the (gradual) construction operators. The incremental/gradual constructivist approach is but one way of achieving this selection.Why it should be gradual/incremental than a one shot dynamic programming optimal solution is a question that cannot be established but empirically. That is by being able to build true AI using the constructivist approach only. But since we are not there yet, I guess that the pro-gradualism more of an inductive type and more a matter of belief and persuasion rather than being grounded in empirical fact."



• "Learning and development are terms that go hand in hand, but a distinction exists that enables us to use the two terms in slightly different contexts. In a general sense, learning may be thought of as the process of realizing or detecting contingencies between input patterns or sequences of input patterns we learn from observations the relationships between events; one may argue that the accumulation of such realizations is the process of development, indicating that development is simply a temporal quality of learning - Piaget provides a more definite treatment of development, however, with an added distinction; developmental stages are differentiated by increasingly elaborate structures for dealing with the environment (113) or for learning. We can view learning as an horizontal process which takes place across existing realized structures, metaphors, paradigms, etc we learn relationships between the things we understand without too much effort. Development can be thought of as a rigorous vertical process for example, in kindergarten we enforce our representations of numbers and our ability to count or quantify, and throughout the remainder of grade-school, we struggle to develop more elaborate models for arithmetic and increasingly complex models for logical reasoning. The key thing to keep in mind about development is that it requires continual effort comprised of learning from both successes and failures."



• "Development is achieved (partly) by learning, while learning doesn't necessarily mean development. For example, a human child's mental development is caused by both the maturing of his neural system and the learning through his interactions with the environment. For a robot, its mental development may wholly depend on learning. On the other hand, an adult still may learn something, which is not a development in the psychological sense. For a developmental robot, even if it has achieved its development towards certain tasks, it may still need to learn something (e.g. the values of some parameters) to accomplish a special instance of the tasks."



• "It is difficult to compare learning and development directly because development is just one component of the overall learning process. Learning in general is the process of gaining information about the world. Development is the initial phase of learning that sets up the learner to be able to learn more effectively later; it is the stage of gaining basic information about the learner's body and basic causal structure of the environment. It bootstraps the rest of learning.
  
  Specifically, development begins building a hierarchical predictive model of the world. It prepares the lowest levels of the hierarchy for use by higher levels later. After development the model might need to be updated constantly if the agent lives in a changing environment."



• "I think that development and learning, with respect to robotics, are similar from the standpoint that they are both working towards the same end result. Both are striving for robot functionality that will reach, and then surpass, that of humans. The only evident difference between them is the literal definition (less than definite), and the obvious separation of human development and learning. Based on these, I think that development uses learning to adapt to any type of situation. Development allows for changes to the usually static learning model, producing a dynamic process that depends on the situation and level of previous knowledge. A developmental learning scheme would start from the ground up, learning how to use each of the robots senses individually, each with it s own separate learning model. With time, correlations are found between the senses, and new higher-level senses are formed from the fusion of the senses. Now, from visual and somatosensory cues, the robot can form a sense of body, where it is, what it may hit, and what it is touching, by associating perceived touches with feelings. It can now use these higher-level senses to learn about the environment, and other external phenomena. In this way, the robot has developed its ability to learn more complex concepts."



• "Before this question is asked, I did not care too much about the distinction between 'development' (or nature) and 'learning' (or nurture). Thanks to this question, I had a chance to ponder on the difference between the two. I have thought that, in robotics, development was one kind of learning. Though, in literal meaning, they are different; learning usually happens in more complicated organisms than development does, there were a few reasons which made me believe development was learning. One of the reasons is from the bias on machine learning. The complexity of concepts machine learning methods can acquire seems to be a little too primitive when compared with that of human's learning. In terms of performance, I believe, machine learning is closer to development than to human's learning. Another reason is that development is usually one of natural characteristics of organisms, not for inorganic matters. In that sense, I had thought 'developmental robotics' as some fancy wording for learning robotics. (I know, in 'developmental robotics', development is the goal, not the current result of that field, as intelligence is in AI.)
  
  After some literature reviews and look-up of dictionary, I admitted that I misunderstood a notion of development and I have understood that development is different from learning. However, I am not sure whether we emulate 'development' enough differently from the way we emulate 'learning'.
  
  To explain why, I want to start with a distinction between development and learning in living organisms. If we talk only about living organisms, obviously development is different from learning. Language or religion is learned, whereas eye color or blood type is natal. There are a little complicated ones. Intelligence, or weight can be considered to be dependent to both. The difference between learning and development is not hard but it is hard to define a certain subset of organisms traits as a result of learning or a result of development. In turn, this makes it very difficult to discern 'development' and 'learning' in robotics. Robots do not have genes or DNA.
  
  According to (Brown, 1994), development is all changes to an individual that happen from fertilization to maturity. We try to emulate development in inorganic matters (i.e. robot, or computer), though eventually we may be able to move to organism in the future.
  
  However, most savvy techniques described in the class so far seem to share the same insight with reinforcement learning (Sutton, 1992) and Bayes theorem, which leads to Bayesian learning. I think, in developmental robotics, nearly all behaviors of robots are actually learned or natal (but hard-coded not developmental). Also, There are many lazy learning techniques that one (at least I) may not be able to differentiate between the two. They have nothing to do with 'development', as far as I understand.
  
  In conclusion, I am not aware of any researches that apply pure developmental phenomenon into application what is useful in robotics, which is the reason why the distinction between development and learning in robotics is not obvious."



• "I think that there four main stages in mind evolution that are ordered increasingly by their complexity: 1. Memorization: is the neurobiological process of storing new information in the brain. The access to the information is guaranteed by the manner in which storage has been done. 2. Learning: is smart memorization in the sense that is a sequence of memorizations that are guided by the already acquired memories (experience). In a sense, learning is memorization of only new information. The reconstruction of the event to be remembered can be done only by also using old memories. 3. Study: is objective-driven learning. That means that study is a loop composed of learning and testing of the new knowledge. Study ends as soon as the test is passed. 4. Development: is a complex process that encompasses all of the processes above. In some domains, the internal knowledge is well structured as the result of study and in others it is sparse and composed only by non-related memorized instances. In conclusion, I think learning is part of development and that development is the general description of various memorization, learning and study processes."



• "There seems to be a really fine line between learning and development. In my mind, learning something does not imply development. Learning is the act of acquiring knowledge. For instance, I can learn who the president is or I can learn how many feet are in a mile I can also learn how to play baseball. Learning how to play baseball does not imply I am capable of playing baseball, it just means I know what needs to be done to play the game. If I want to be able to play the game, this is where development comes into play. I have to take time to teach my body how to perform the operations of catching or hitting the ball. I think it is safe to say development is learning over time. This could be the reason for a very shady line between development and learning. Using these definitions, relating this to robots is quite simple. The robots learning is its acquisition of facts from its surroundings or its record of inputs from different sensors. The development of the robot is its use of all the information it has learned and deriving ways to accomplish its tasks based on what it has learned."



• "Development and learning are related and interconnected, yet there are slight differences between the two. Development is a wholistic term used to describe changes (improvement) in one's mental abilities as the time progresses. Development incorporates learning at every stage; moreover, it is essential to use the current mental capacity and the skills acquired at/up to a certain stage to progress to the next stage of development. Learning is a more narrow term that refers to a small area (a certain skill, concept, etc) and describes acquiring the ability to perform a certain task or gaining knowledge of certain concept/rules/etc. The key difference is that during development, at an early stage the child/animal may not possess the skills or mental capacity needed to be able to learn something from a much later stage. For example, it's not possible to teach the baby to write words without the baby knowing the concept of language and being able to speak or read."



• "I think that there is a difference between learning and development. To me, learning merely implies forming some sort of connection between a body and its environment, whereas development implies building intuition. Returning to the example used in lecture, a door knob or door handle can have any of various appearances. A young child, who has never used a door before, learns how to turn the handle to open the door. The intuition that he or she develops is that the door handle, regardless of how it looks, is used to open the door. As the child grows, he or she develops intuition as to which part of a door is the handle; it may not be in the same place on every door, and there may be other decorative items on the door."



• "I see one slight difference in connotation between learning and development. The definition of learning seems to be the more general of the two terms. Learning is the process of acquiring new data and ways to use that data for a given system. Development implies a change in the system as learning proceeds. Physical maturation is one implication of development, but we could also focus on the definition of purely intellectual development versus merely learning. To develop means to move on, to go forward. Intellectual development usually refers to the developing ability to process more complex concepts. A system that continued learning the favorite colors of all the people with which it interacted would be learning, but not developing since the process did not initiate a systemic change."



• "I will discuss the difference between learning and development in the context of Piaget's cognitive development theory. Piaget's theory suggest that true learning is not something handed down by the teacher, but something that comes from the child. It is a process of spontaneous invention and discovery.
  
  Piaget indicates that the development through those stages is caused by biology, culture and equilibration factors. Equilibration model says that "the changes occurs when our idea meet with counterevidence that motivates us to formulate new and better idea" For instance, when liquid in one cup is moved into another cup with higher but narrower shape, the baby may think it is confusing when considering both dimensions of length and width. This contradicts to the initial view if he or she only considers one dimension. It will lead the baby to explore and discover of conservation.
  
  On the other hand, common learning is generally regarded as some products of "external reinforcements and teaching". It suggests that the environment is all for the children cognitive development. However, although environment provides stimuli for children, only children themselves can build cognitive structure.
  
  The "ball hit" case will make the concepts more clear. Suppose there is a student that wants to learn how to play tennis, he or she may learn something from a tutor. The tutor will tell the student how to grasp the racket, how to move the steps and so on. The student will "learn" the basic principle from the tutor. However, the student can only develop the technique by a lot of exercises. Thus he or she develops the something through experiences or experiments."



• "I am not sure whether you mean learning and development in humans or learning in development in general. In humans, I would argue that all development is learning but not all learning is development. For example, when I memorize a song, I would not consider that development when I do that my neocortex simply learns a sequence of words to a tune by associating each part to the next. The fact that I am able to memorize a song, however, is a result of me having developed the ability to distinguish individual lyrics, words, etc. On an even higher level, it is due to development that I am able to learn sequence of any kind. The specific uses of that skill can be thought as learning, but the skill itself is developed over a period in the infant s life. In other words, it is through development that the child realizes that he or she is capable of storing sequences of patterns and reasoning about them. The actual use of that skill is what I would consider learning.
  
  This of course is a question of semantic interpretation. Do we learn to learn the same way we learn to memorize a song? I am not too knowledgeable in the implementation difference in the brain, but I would guess that the process through which a child figures out how to use its neocortex is quite different from the process that runs in the neocortex itself. That is why I consider learning and development to be different."



• "I do believe that learning and development are different. While it is true that both learning and development are processes that change an entity to maximize an objective function or fitness, learning is more of a subset of development. An example is the morphological development of an organism. As an organism, say a human baby for concreteness, grows the limbs get longer, the body gets heavier, and the baby eventually becomes an adult with all of the innate tools for surviving in the world (assuming that the baby develops normally). We can see that learning plays an important part in the adaptation to these changes, however, learning is also obviously not the only process at work in this example. Just the fact that adult humans are much larger is an advantage (mostly) over the small size of the baby and so provides a benefit to the organism."



• "I believe learning is very different from development. Development is systematic changes, orderly, patterned, relatively enduring changes, and continuities, ways in which individuals remains the same or continue to reflect their past, in individuals during their lifetime. Also development can be thought as growing, improving, expanding, in individuals. Learning is the process through which experience brings about relatively permanent changes in thoughts, feelings, or behavior. Also learning can be thought as gaining knowledge or skills by study. Here is an example of learning a child can dribble a basketball but careful instruction and long hours of practice are required for the child to excel in basketball. The baby that developed the ability to crawl has the opportunity to explore things like cabinets and shelves and develop their mind this is an example of development. Another example of learning is classical conditioning. In a classical conditioning example a baby was shown a white rat and no response is shown then a loud noise is associated with the rat and when the baby sees the rat it cries. The baby learns to fear the rat. Another example of development is role-playing in school as a parent or mother with dolls. The child experiments with the roles and develops ideas for taking care of babies, cooking, and other roles."



• "Development is when the mind starts to think about higher concepts, such as when an infant starts to be able to use symbolic thought. It is a progression in either the thought process abilities (symbols, logical thought, concrete operational thought) or knowledge representation schema (object permanence, object properties). Normal learning only introduces new data into the already established structure (and also may modify some existing data)."



• "It is my belief that learning is any situation where there is mapping to memory of a movement or action to an outcome. Development is any situation where a basic, pre-programmed functions is performed and altered (hopefully improved) solely by the robot. These to ideas, although each is distinct, happen most often together. In a situation where a developmental robot alters its function, it first had to map to memory a action and outcome, and decide whether it was a good outcome. So many developmental robots would use learning techniques to develop its actions, but a learning robot will not necessarily be considered a developmental robot."

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