Social interaction can be a means to facilitate learning. New skills may be socially transfered from caregiver to infant through mimicry or imitation, through direct tutelage, or by means of scaffolding, in which a more able adult manipulates the infant’s interactions with the environment to foster novel abilities. Commonly scaffolding involves reducing distractions, marking the task’s critical attributes, reducing the number of degrees of freedom in the target task, and enabling the infant to experience the end or outcome before she is cognitively or physically able of seeking and attaining it for herself. We are currently engaged in work studying bootstrapping new behaviors from social interactions.

The social skills required to make use of scaffolding are complex. Infants acquire these social skills through a developmental progression. One of the earliest precursors is the ability to share attention with the caregiver. This ability can take many forms, from the recognition of a pointing gesture to maintaining eye contact . In our work, we have also examined social interaction from this developmental perspective, building systems that can recognize and respond to joint attention by finding faces and eyes and imitating head nods of the caregiver.