Joint attention with strangers based on generalization through joint attention with caregivers

Joint attention is supposed to be a basis of the competence of communication with others. The authors have been attacking the issue how to learn joint attention only through interactions with caregivers, in other words, without external task evaluation from a viewpoint of a constructivist approach towards both establishing a design principle of communicative robots and understanding the developmental process of human communication. This paper presents a method for quick learning of joint attention with unfamiliar persons based on a hybrid architecture that consists of (1) a quick but person-dependent learning module and (2) a slow but person-independent learning module. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.