Reproducing Interaction Contingency Toward Open-Ended Development of Social Actions: Case Study on Joint Attention

How can human infants gradually socialize through interaction with their caregivers? This paper presents a learning mechanism that incrementally acquires social actions by finding and reproducing the contingency in interaction with a caregiver. A contingency measure based on transfer entropy is used to select the appropriate pairs of variables to be associated to acquire social actions from the set of all possible pairs. Joint attention behavior is tested to examine the development of social actions caused by responding to changes in caregiver behavior due to reproducing the found contingency. The results of computer simulations of human-robot interaction indicate that a robot acquires a series of actions related to joint attention such as gaze following and alternation in an order that almost matches the infant development of joint attention found in developmental psychology. The difference in the order between them is discussed based on the analysis of robot behavior, and then future issues are given.