Infants Help a Non-Human Agent

Young children can be motivated to help adults by sympathetic concern based upon empathy, but the underlying mechanisms are unknown. One account of empathy-based sympathetic helping in adults states that it arises due to direct-matching mirror-system mechanisms which allow the observer to vicariously experience the situation of the individual in need of help. This mechanism could not account for helping of a geometric-shape agent lacking human-isomorphic bodyparts. Here 17-month-olds observed a ball-shaped non-human agent trying to reach a goal but failing because it was blocked by a barrier. Infants helped the agent by lifting it over the barrier. They performed this action less frequently in a control condition in which the barrier could not be construed as blocking the agent. Direct matching is therefore not required for motivating helping in infants, indicating that at least some of our early helpful tendencies do not depend on human-specific mechanisms. Empathy-based mechanisms that do not require direct-matching provide one plausible basis for the observed helping. A second possibility is that rather than being based on empathy, the observed helping occurred as a result of a goal-contagion process in which the infants were primed with the unfulfilled goal

Abnormal social reward processing in autism as indexed by pupillary responses to happy faces

Background: Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) typically show impaired eye contact during social interactions. From a young age, they look less at faces than typically developing (TD) children and tend to avoid direct gaze. However, the reason for this behavior remains controversial; ASD children might avoid eye contact because they perceive the eyes as aversive or because they do not find social engagement through mutual gaze rewarding. Methods: We monitored pupillary diameter as a measure of autonomic response in children with ASD (n = 20, mean age = 12.4) and TD controls (n = 18, mean age = 13.7) while they looked at faces displaying different emotions. Each face displayed happy, fearful, angry or neutral emotions with the gaze either directed to or averted from the subjects. Results: Overall, children with ASD and TD controls showed similar pupillary responses; however, they differed significantly in their sensitivity to gaze direction for happy faces. Specifically, pupillary diameter increased among TD children when viewing happy faces with direct gaze as compared to those with averted gaze, whereas children with ASD did not show such sensitivity to gaze direction. We found no group differences in fixation that could explain the differential pupillary responses. There was no effect of gaze direction on pupil diameter for negative affect or neutral faces among either the TD or ASD group. Conclusions: We interpret the increased pupillary diameter to happy faces with direct gaze in TD children to reflect the intrinsic reward value of a smiling face looking directly at an individual. The lack of this effect in children with ASD is consistent with the hypothesis that individuals with ASD may have reduced sensitivity to the reward value of social stimuli

Towards a Task-Aware Proactive Sociable Robot Based on Multi-state Perspective-Taking

International audienceRobots are expected to cooperate with humans in day-to-day interaction. One aspect of such cooperation is behaving proactively. In this paper we will enable our robots, equipped with visuo-spatial perspective-taking capabilities, to behave proactively based on reasoning ‘where’ its human partner might perform a particular task with different effort levels. For this, the robot analyzes the agents’ abilities not only from the current state but also from a set of different states the agent might attain.Depending on the task and the situation, the robot exhibits different types of proactive behaviors, such as, reaching out, suggesting a solution and providing clues by head movement, for two different tasks performed by the human partner: give and make accessible. These proactive behaviors are intended to be informative to reduce confusion of the human partner, to communicate the robot’s ability and intention and to guide the partner for better cooperation.We have validated the behaviors by user studies, which suggest that such proactive behaviors reduce the ‘confusion’ and ‘effort’ of the users. Further, the participants reported the robot to be more ‘supportive and aware’ compared to the situations where the robot was non-proactive.Such proactive behaviors could enrich multi-modal interaction and cooperation capabilities of the robot as well as help in developing more complex socially expected and accepted behaviors in the human centered environment