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Designing a mechanism that will allow a robot to imitate the actions of a human, apart from being interesting for opening the possibilities for efficient social learning through observation and imitation, is challenging since it requires the integration of information from the visual, memory and motor systems. This paper deals with the implementation of an imitation architecture on an active, stereo vision head, and describes our experiments on the deferred imitation of human head movements. 1 Introduction Robots of the near future are expected to operate among humans, who will want them to not only function effectively, safely and with minimum discomfort to their users, but to be able to learn and adapt to their particular lifestyle. Preprogramming robots with specific task solving capabilities and individual trial and error learning can only get them up to a certain level of competence. The ability to learn based on observation and interaction with other agents in their environment...

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. This paper discusses the emergence of sensorimotor coordination for ESCHeR, a 4DOF redundant foveated robot-head, by interaction with its environment. A feedback-errorlearning (FEL)-based distributed control provides the system with explorative abilities with reflexes constraining the learning space. A Kohonen network, trained at run-time, categorizes the sensorimotor patterns obtained over ESCHeR's interaction with its environment, enables the reinforcement of frequently executed actions, thus stabilizing the learning activity over time. We explain how the development of ESCHeR's visual abilities (namely gaze fixation and saccadic motion), from a context-free reflex-based control process to a context-dependent, pattern-based sensorimotor coordination can be related to the Piagetian 'stage theory'. Keywords: Foveated active vision, Oculomotor control, Feedback-error-learning, Emergent coordination, Sensorimotor memory. 1. Introduction Human babies are born with a rich set of innate ...

Learning through imitation is a powerful and versatile method for acquiring new behaviors. In humans, a wide range of behaviors, from styles of social interaction to tool use, are passed from one generation to another through imitative learning. Although imitation evolved through Darwinian means, it achieves Lamarckian ends: it is a mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Unlike trial-and-error-based learning methods such as reinforcement learning, imitation allows rapid learning.

Findings in the social psychology literatures on attitudes, social perception, and emotion demonstrate that social information processing involves embodiment, where embodiment refers both to actual bodily states and to simulations of experience in the brain’s modality-specific systems for perception, action, and introspection. We show that embodiment underlies social information processing when the perceiver interacts with actual social objects (online cognition) and when the perceiver represents social objects in their absence (offline cognition). Although many empirical demonstrations of social embodiment exist, no particularly compelling account of them has been offered. We propose that theories of embodied cognition, such as the Perceptual Symbol Systems (PSS) account (Barsalou, 1999), explain and integrate these findings, and that they also suggest exciting new directions for research. We compare the PSS account to a variety of related proposals and show how it addresses criticisms that have previously posed problems for the general embodiment approach. Consider the following findings. Wells and Petty (1980) reported that nodding the head (as in agreement)

Developmental robotics is an emerging field located at the intersection of developmental psychology and robotics, that has lately attracted quite some attention. This paper gives a survey of a variety of research projects dealing with or inspired by developmental issues, and outlines possible future directions.

The past century of theory about human development has placed much responsibility for normal socio-emotional development on the social interactions

How and why the presence of a person directly affects the perception and action of another person is a phenomenon that has been approached in a limited and piecemeal fashion within psychology. This kind of diffuse strategy has failed to capture the jointness of perception and action within and between people. In contradistinction, the authors offer a perspective that retains both integrally social features (e.g., involves interaction) and yet adequately exploits the current state of knowledge regarding the ecological properties of perception–action, while at the same time drawing on aspects of dynamic systems theory. In this article the authors review the best attempts to examine how one individual affects another’s perceptions and actions in the emergence of a social unit of action. Two important approaches, the individual-level and cognitive dynamics approaches, have yielded insights that derive in significant degree from principles of ecological psychology and/or dynamical systems theory. Prototypic of the individual-level approach is a focus on what can be perceived by coactors with the aim of uncovering how the dispositional qualities (affordances) of another person are informationally specified during social interaction. In contrast, the cognitive dynamics approach simulates dynamical characteristics of cognition and psychological influence with the aim of uncovering how cooperative interaction emerges out of its component parts. The authors argue that these approaches involve, respectively, insufficient mutuality and insufficient embodiment. Consequently, a social synergy perspective is discussed that approaches the problem of socially cooperative interaction at the relational, nonreductive level, using novel methods to examine how social perception and action emerge through self-organizing processes.

The paper provides a summary of our recent research on preverbal infants (using violation-of-expectation and observational learning paradigms) demonstrating that one-year-olds interpret and draw systematic inferences about other's goal-directed actions, and can rely on such inferences when imitating other's actions or emulating their goals. To account for these findings it is proposed that oneyear -olds apply a non-mentalistic action interpretational system, the 'teleological stance' that represents actions by relating relevant aspects of reality (action, goal-state, and situational constraints) through the principle of rational action, which assumes that actions function to realize goal-states by the most efficient means available in the actor's situation. The