Posture is critical in the early stages of acquiring new knowledge, according to a recent study.

Research conducted by scientists at Indiana University offers a new approach to studying the way "objects of cognition," such as words or memories of physical objects, are tied to the position of the body.

"This study shows that the body plays a role in early object name learning, and how toddlers use the body's position in space to connect ideas," researcher Linda Smith, a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, in collaboration with a roboticist from England and a developmental psychologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. "The creation of a robot model for infant learning has far-reaching implications for how the brains of young people work."

Using both robots and infants, researchers examined the role bodily position played in the brain's ability to "map" names to objects. They found that consistency of the body's posture and spatial relationship to an object as an object's name was shown and spoken aloud were critical to successfully connecting the name to the object.

The new insights stem from the field of epigenetic robotics, in which researchers are working to create robots that learn and develop like children, through interaction with their environment. Morse applied Smith's earlier research to creating a learning robot in which cognitive processes emerge from the physical constraints and capacities of its body.

"These experiments may provide a new way to investigate the way cognition is connected to the body, as well as new evidence that mental entities, such as thoughts, words and representations of objects, which seem to have no spatial or bodily components, first take shape through spatial relationship of the body within the surrounding world," Smith said.

The findings are detailed in PLOS ONE, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal.