Perceptual Perspective Taking and Action Recognition

Robots that operate in social environments need to be able to recognise and understand the actions of other robots, and humans, in order to facilitate learning through imitation and collaboration. The success of the simulation theory approach to action recognition and imitation relies on the ability to take the perspective of other people, so as to generate simulated actions from their point of view. In this paper, simulation of visual perception is used to re-create the visual egocentric sensory space and egocentric behaviour space of an observed agent, and through this increase the accuracy of action recognition. To demonstrate the approach, experiments are performed with a robot attributing perceptions to and recognising the actions of a second robot

Exploring the relationship between task, teacher actions, and student learning

We are examining actions that teachers take to convert tasks into learning opportunities. In this paper, we contrast ways that three teachers convert the same task into lessons, and the way that their lessons reflect their intent. We found that the teachers did what they intended to do, that this was connected to their appreciation of the mathematics involved, and directly influenced the learning opportunities of the students. To the extent that the potential of the task was reduced, this seemed due to the lack of mathematical confidence in the case of two of the teachers