Developmental Construction of Intentional Agency in Communicative Eye Gaze

In the communicative eye gaze such as joint visual attention and gaze alternation, the importance of intentional agency is pointed out. Namely, infants understand others’ intentions and also intentionally gaze at others’ gazing points. In this paper, for investigating the development of the intentional agency that the infant separates desired goals from the actions, we constructed a computational model that is able to acquire the ability of the gaze alternation to an object outside the visual field based on the intentional agency. In the construction and operation of the model, we confirmed that two functions play an important role in the visual joint attention. The one function performs discrimination between the caregiver and the object, the other does association evoked by visual stimuli by storing the relations between sensory states during looking at the caregiver’s face and that during looking at the objects as a frequency distribution. We discussed the process of the joint visual attention from the viewpoint of the intentional agency. Based on the discussion, we claims that the association can be thought of as a goal that is possessed as the agent’s internal state and the movement of the gaze point can be thought of as an action to achieve the goal.