Growing up architecture: specifications from psychology

This paper describes some concepts which are important for the creation of autonomous agents capable of growing up. Growing up means that living systems, starting from a pre-structured set of functions, develop competence to better adapt to the environment all life long, from childhood to maturity. A living artefact grows up when its capabilities, abilities/knowledge, shift to a further level of complexity, i.e. the complexity rank of its internal capabilities performs a step forward. We want to define an architecture containing mechanisms which play the same role for autonomous agents as the mechanisms that make humans so successful [1]. In the attempt to define an architecture for autonomous growing up agents, we have been investigating the abstraction process in children as natural parts of a cognitive system. We studied deliberative and non-deliberative (emergent) mental adaptive and growing up mechanisms. A list of functional requirements based on these concepts is then proposed.