Development of First Social Referencing Skills: Emotional Interaction as a Way to Regulate Robot Behavior

In this paper, we study how emotional interactions with a social partner can bootstrap increasingly complex behaviors such as social referencing. Our idea is that social referencing as well as facial expression recognition can emerge from a simple sensory-motor system involving emotional stimuli. Without knowing that the other is an agent, the robot is able to learn some complex tasks if the human partner has some “empathy” or at least “resonate” with the robot head (low level emotional resonance). Hence, we advocate the idea that social referencing can be bootstrapped from a simple sensory-motor system not dedicated to social interactions.