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Despite the intuitive power of these concepts to trace the course of sensorimotor development, they have gradually lost ground in psychology. This likely due to the lack of brain-related views capturing the dynamic mechanisms underlying them. Here we propose that brain modular and hierarchical organization is crucial to understanding assimilation\/accommodation. We devise an experiment where a bio-inspired modular and hierarchical mixture-of-experts model guides a simulated robot to learn different reaching tasks by trial-and-error. The model gives a novel interpretation of assimilation\/accommodation based on the functional organization of the experts allocated through learning. Assimilation occurs when the model adapts a copy of the expert trained for solving a task, to face another task requiring similar sensorimotor mappings. Experts storing similar sensorimotor mappings belong to the same functional module. Accommodation occurs when the model uses non-trained experts to face tasks requiring different sensorimotor mappings (generating a new functional group of experts). The model also provides a new theoretical framework to investigate assimilation\/accommodation impairment, and proposes that such impairment might be related to autism spectrum disorder.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/1059712314539710","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2014,9,19]],"date-time":"2014-09-19T22:48:25Z","timestamp":1411166905000},"page":"304-329","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":10,"title":["Modular and hierarchical brain organization to understand assimilation, accommodation and their relation to autism in reaching tasks: a developmental robotics hypothesis"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"22","author":[{"given":"Daniele","family":"Caligiore","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy"}]},{"given":"Paolo","family":"Tommasino","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore"}]},{"given":"Valerio","family":"Sperati","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy"}]},{"given":"Gianluca","family":"Baldassarre","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Computational Embodied Neuroscience, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2014,9,19]]},"reference":[{"key":"bibr1-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1152\/jn.00795.2010"},{"key":"bibr2-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1146\/annurev.ne.09.030186.002041"},{"key":"bibr3-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.dr.2009.12.003"},{"key":"bibr4-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/S1389-0417(01)00039-0"},{"key":"bibr5-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1109\/DEVLRN.2011.6037367"},{"key":"bibr6-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-39875-9_11"},{"key":"bibr7-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neunet.2012.09.015"},{"key":"bibr8-1059712314539710","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-642-32375-1"},{"key":"bibr9-1059712314539710","first-page":"112","volume-title":"Proceedings of the international conference on developmental learning (ICDL 2004)","author":"Barto A. 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