Development of joint attention and social referencing

Abstract

In this work, we are interested in understanding how emotional interactions with a social partner can bootstrap increasingly complex behaviors such as social referencing. Our idea is that social referencing, facial expression recognition and the joint attention can emerge from a simple sensori-motor architecture. Without knowing that the other is an agent, we show our robot is able to learn some complex tasks if the human partner has a low level emotional resonance with the robot head. Hence we advocate the idea that social referencing can be bootstrapped from a simple sensori-motor system not dedicated to social interactions.