If we are to build human-like robots that can interact naturally with people, our robots must know not only about the properties of objects but also the properties of animate agents in the world. One of the fundamental social skills for humans is the attribution of beliefs, goals, and desires to other people. This set of skills has often been called a “theory of mind.” This paper presents the theories of Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995) on the development of theory of mind in human children and discusses the potential application of both of these theories to building robots with similar capabilities. Initial implementation details and basic skills (such as finding faces and eyes and distinguishing animate from inanimate stimuli) are introduced. I further speculate on the usefulness of a robotic implementation in evaluating and comparing these two models.

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The acquisition of infant causal perception has been the center of considerable debate, and some have attributed this phenomenon to an innate causal module. Recent studies, however, suggest that causal knowledge may develop in infants through experience with the environment. We present a computational model of causal knowledge acquisition built using the Constructivist Learning Architecture, a hierarchical self-organizing system. This system does a remarkably good job of developing causal perception from a component view to a holistic view in a way that mirrors data from habituation studies with human infants. Causal Perception in Infants Causal perception has been the focus of philosophical inquiry for centuries, but it received its first notable psychological investigation by Michotte (1963). He presented adults with a scene in which one billiard ball struck another stationary ball, resulting in the launching of the stationary ball, and the halting of the moving ball. T...

The capacity for shared attention is a cornerstone of human social intelligence. Recent accounts attribute the emergence of shared attention to multiple cognitive mechanisms. Current behavioral data support an alternative dynamic systems model, but many questions remain. To answer these questions and test alternative theories, robotic models will play a critical role. Robotic models reduce the scope of the modeling task, permit comparison of empirically supported theories, and encourage parsimonious models of complex behaviors. Current efforts to model the emergence of shared attention are described. 1.

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One of the fundamental social skills for humans is a theory of other minds. This set of skills allows us to attribute beliefs, goals, and desires to other individuals. To take part in normal human social dynamics, a robot must not only know about the properties of objects, but also the properties of animate agents in the world. This paper presents the theories of Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995) on the development of theory of mind in human children and discusses the potential application of both of these theories to building robots with similar capabilities. Initial implementation details and basic skills (such as finding faces and eyes and distinguishing animate from inanimate stimuli) are introduced. We further speculate on the usefulness of a robotic implementation in evaluating and comparing these two models.

This paper reviews research that addresses the problems of extracting descriptions of object behaviour from image sequences. Vision systems are now capable of delivering trajectory-based descriptions of moving objects in a scene but little work has been done on the higher-level spatio-temporal reasoning needed for the computation of behavioural descriptions. This level of understanding, which allows meaningful descriptions of what is happening in a scene, seems to be a prerequisite for communication between users and machine based vision systems. The approaches discussed here can be separated into three main classes: those that treat the problem as an off-line query-based process, those that attempt an on-line model-based interpretation, and those that adopt a more active vision stategy. Some evidence from the psycholinguistic literature, event perception, and recent developments in reactive planning are brought together to support the proposal that active, purposive frameworks are req...

This experiment investigated 12-month-old infants’ ability to link an event’s beginning to its probable ending. Following Csibra, Biro, Koos, and Gergely (2003), infants were habituated to a simple chasing event involving animated balls, and at test saw 2 possible endings: either 1 ball caught the other or failed to do so. Two controls Do Not Copy were added to the previous work. First, the total amount of motion was controlled in the test endings; second, the endings were paired with a nonchasing beginning to ensure that behavior at test reflected representation of the event beginning itself. The results replicated Csibra et al.’s finding that infants look longer at the noncatching ending following the chasing beginning; moreover, infants showed no preference for either ending following the no-chasing beginning. This study supports the claim that infants can calculate the rational ending of a goal-directed motion event.