291 research outputs found
How does an infant acquire the ability of joint attention?: A Constructive Approach
This study argues how a human infant acquires
the ability of joint attention through
interactions with its caregiver from the viewpoint
of a constructive approach. This paper
presents a constructive model by which a
robot acquires a sensorimotor coordination for
joint attention based on visual attention and
learning with self-evaluation. Since visual attention
does not always correspond to joint attention,
the robot may have incorrect learning
situations for joint attention as well as correct
ones. However, the robot is expected to statistically
lose the data of the incorrect ones
as outliers through the learning, and consequently
acquires the appropriate sensorimotor
coordination for joint attention even if the
environment is not controlled nor the caregiver
provides any task evaluation. The experimental
results suggest that the proposed
model could explain the developmental mechanism
of the infant’s joint attention because
the learning process of the robot’s joint attention
can be regarded as equivalent to the
developmental process of the infant’s one
Binding tactile and visual sensations via unique association by cross-anchoring between double-touching and self-occlusion
Binding is one of the most fundamental cognitive functions, how to find the correspondence of sensations between different modalities such as vision and touch. Without a priori knowledge on this correspondence, binding is regarded to be a formidable issue for a robot since it often perceives multiple physical phenomena in its different modal sensors, therefore it should correctly match the foci of attention in different modalities that may have multiple correspondences each other. We suppose that learning the multimodal representation of the body should be the first step toward binding since the morphological constraints in self-body-observation would make the binding problem tractable. The multimodal sensations are expected to be constrained in perceiving own body so as to configurate the unique parts of the multiple correspondence reflecting its morphology. In this paper, we propose a method to match the foci of attention in vision and touch through the unique association by cross-anchoring different modalities. Simple experiments show the validity of the proposed method
Development of artificial empathy
AbstractWe have been advocating cognitive developmental robotics to obtain new insight into the development of human cognitive functions by utilizing synthetic and constructive approaches. Among the different emotional functions, empathy is difficult to model, but essential for robots to be social agents in our society. In my previous review on artificial empathy (Asada, 2014b), I proposed a conceptual model for empathy development beginning with emotional contagion to envy/schadenfreude along with self/other differentiation. In this article, the focus is on two aspects of this developmental process, emotional contagion in relation to motor mimicry, and cognitive/affective aspects of the empathy. It begins with a summary of the previous review (Asada, 2014b) and an introduction to affective developmental robotics as a part of cognitive developmental robotics focusing on the affective aspects. This is followed by a review and discussion on several approaches for two focused aspects of affective developmental robotics. Finally, future issues involved in the development of a more authentic form of artificial empathy are discussed
A Constructive Model of Mother-Infant Interaction towards Infant’s Vowel Articulation
Human infants seem to develop to acquire
common phonemes to adults without the capability
to articulate or any explicit knowledge.
To understand such unrevealed human
cognitive development, building a robot
which reproduces such a developmental process
seems effective. It will also contribute to
a design principle for a robot that can communicate
with human beings. This paper hypothesizes
that the caregiver’s parrotry to the
coo of the robot plays an important role in the
phoneme acquisition process based on the implication
from behavioral studies, and propose
a constructive model for it. We validate the
proposed model by examining whether a real
robot can acquire Japanese vowels through interactions
with its caregiver
Spike timing-dependent plasticity under imbalanced excitation and inhibition reduces the complexity of neural activity
Excitatory and inhibitory neurons are fundamental components of the brain, and healthy neural circuits are well balanced between excitation and inhibition (E/I balance). However, it is not clear how an E/I imbalance affects the self-organization of the network structure and function in general. In this study, we examined how locally altered E/I balance affects neural dynamics such as the connectivity by activity-dependent formation, the complexity (multiscale entropy) of neural activity, and information transmission. In our simulation, a spiking neural network model was used with the spike-timing dependent plasticity rule to explore the above neural dynamics. We controlled the number of inhibitory neurons and the inhibitory synaptic weights in a single neuron group out of multiple neuron groups. The results showed that a locally increased E/I ratio strengthens excitatory connections, reduces the complexity of neural activity, and decreases information transmission between neuron groups in response to an external input. Finally, we argued the relationship between our results and excessive connections and low complexity of brain activity in the neuropsychiatric brain disorders
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