Imitation and Mechanisms of Shared Attention: A Developmental Structure for Building Social Skills

This paper explores the use of imitation in an on-going research program aimed at enabling a humanoid robot to communicate naturally with humans. Our group has constructed an upper-torso humanoid robot, called Cog, in part to investigate how to build intelligent robotic systems by following a developmental progression of skills similar to that observed in human development. Just as a child learns social skills and conventions through interactions with its parents, our robot will learn to interact with people using natural social communication. Our models of social interaction are drawn from developmental models of normal children, developmental models of autism, and on models of the evolutionary development of social skills. In this paper, we consider the role that imitation plays in the development of a critical pre-cursor of normal human social development, mechanisms of shared attention. Mechanisms of shared attention serve to direct two individuals to attend to the same object in the environment, through eye direction, pointing gestures, and other means. Imitation serves a critical role in bootstrapping a system from simple eye behaviors to more complex social skills. We will present data from a face and eye finding system that serves as the basis of this developmental chain, and a short example of how this system can imitate the head movements of