Social Interactions
The Cog Shop
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
545 Technology Square, #920
Cambridge, MA 02139
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Human infants are extremely
dependent on their caregivers, relying upon them not only for basic necessities but also
as a guide to their development. This reliance on social contact is so integrated into our
species that it is hard to imagine a completely asocial human; developmental disorders
that effect social development, such as autism and Aspergers syndrome, are extremely
debilitating and can have far-reaching consequences. Building social skills into an
artificial intelligence provides not only a natural means of human-machine interaction but
also a mechanism for bootstrapping more complex behavior. Our research program has
investigated social interaction both as a means for bootstrapping and as an instance of
developmental progression. 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 infants interactions with the environment to foster novel abilities.
Commonly scaffolding involves reducing distractions, marking the tasks 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.
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