ABCDE: An Agent-Based Cognitive Development Environment

TL;DR

The paper introduces ABCDE, a 3D interactive environment designed to simulate naturalistic childhood learning, enabling the study of high-level concept acquisition through learner-teacher interactions.

Contribution

It presents the first environment focused on high-level concept learning in a naturalistic setting using interactive objects and actions.

Findings

Over 300 unique 3D objects included

Supports complex learner-teacher interactions

Aims to facilitate research in cognitive development modeling

Abstract

Children's cognitive abilities are sometimes cited as AI benchmarks. How can the most common 1,000 concepts (89\% of everyday use) be learnt in a naturalistic children's setting? Cognitive development in children is about quality, and new concepts can be conveyed via simple examples. Our approach of knowledge scaffolding uses simple objects and actions to convey concepts, like how children are taught. We introduce ABCDE, an interactive 3D environment modeled after a typical playroom for children. It comes with 300+ unique 3D object assets (mostly toys), and a large action space for child and parent agents to interact with objects and each other. ABCDE is the first environment aimed at mimicking a naturalistic setting for cognitive development in children; no other environment focuses on high-level concept learning through learner-teacher interactions. The simulator can be found at https://pypi.org/project/ABCDESim/1.0.0/