Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Developmental psychology presents us with a puzzle: though children are remarkably apt at planning their actions, theysuffer from surprising yet consistent shortcomings. We argue that these patterns of triumph and failure can be broadlycaptured by the framework of task and motion planning, where plans are hybrid entities consisting of both a structured,symbolic skeleton and a continuous, low-level trajectory. As a proof of concept, we model two case studies from the tooluse literature and show how their results can be understood by the interaction of symbolic and continuous plans.