Doman’s Inclined Floor Method for Early Motor Organization Simulated with a Four Neurons Robot - Foundations on Natural and Artificial Computation - page 110

ramp. The ramp should be slippery and inclined in such an angle that when the
child moves forward, he/she slips and falls a little over the ramp. The lateral
walls of the ramp are painted in black and white stripes[4]. (Doman et al. 2006)
Parents are encouraged to cheerfully make sounds like clapping their hands when
the baby shifts forward over the ramp. Glenn Doman describes the foundations
of this method:
“When a well infant is put on the floor on a belly-down position he does not
know how to crawl ... and his arms and legs moves freely ... these movements will
occasionally result in pushing him forward. When this has happened by accident
over and over again, the baby discovers which movements have that effect and
which do not. He then discovers how the movements that push him forward feel
as distinguished from how the movements that do not push him forward feel.
He finally discovers how to purposely reproduce those motions that push him
forward and how to synchronize them with each other into a pattern.”[3]
Temple Fay and Glenn Doman believe that the nervous system is a sophisti-
cated cybernetic system in exactly the terms Norbert Wiener defined it in his
book Cybernetics.[11]
“It was clear that the human brain, like Dr. Wieners self-regulating system,
operated like a cybernetic loop. In human beings this loop, which begins in the
environment, follows sensory pathways to the brain and motor pathways from
the brain back to the environment.”[3]
It was this idea that stimulated us to construct a simple cybernetic system in
the form of a little robot (see Fig. 1) with a rudimentary sensory system that
consisted in an acceleration detector (mimicking the vestibular system), a mi-
crophone (for mimicking audition) and a light detector sensor (as a rudimentary
visual system). The information from this sensory system arrives to a four neu-
rons neural-network that could be seen as the robot's nervous system. Each of
these neurons is interconnected to each other and also to two servomotors. The
motor pathway of our rudimentary cybernetic system is represented by the out-
puts of the neurons that command the two servomotors. Each neuron activates
either a clock or anti-clock wise direction of each motor.
The environment in our cybernetic system is represented by a ramp, by the
black and white stripes painted on the ramp and by the sound produced by a
baby shaker.
For describing the cybernetic loop that controls the dynamic of the robot we
will paraphrase the above Glenn Doman's explanation:
“When the robot is put on the ramp it is not initially predisposed to move
in any specific direction and its wheels responds to its neuron's commands by
moving randomly, occasionally resulting in pushing the robot down the ramp.
This part of the system, from neurons to wheels, corresponds to the feed forward
part of the robot's cybernetic loop. When the robot's descension happened by
accident over and over again, the robot 'discovers' how the movements that
push him forward feel as distinguished from how the movements that do not
push him forward feel. The difference between these two kinds of movements
is in the size of the sensory inputs because, when descending, the robot slips