When interacting with infants, human adults modify their behaviours in an exaggerated manner. Pre... more When interacting with infants, human adults modify their behaviours in an exaggerated manner. Previous studies have demonstrated that infant-directed modification affects the infant's behaviour. However, little is known about how infant-directed modification is elicited during infant-parent interaction. We investigated whether and how the infant's behaviour affects the mother's action during an interaction. We recorded three-dimensional information of cup movements while mothers demonstrated a cup-nesting task during interaction with their infants aged 11 to 13 months. Analyses revealed that spatial characteristics of the mother's task demonstration clearly changed depending on the infant's object manipulation. In particular, the variance in the distance that the cup was moved decreased after the infant's cup nesting and increased after the infant's task-irrelevant manipulation (e.g. cup banging). This pattern was not observed for mothers with 6- to 8-mon...
Robots are less and less programmed to execute a specic behavior, but develop abilities through t... more Robots are less and less programmed to execute a specic behavior, but develop abilities through the interactions with their environment. In our previous studies, we proposed a robotic model for the emergence of helping behavior based on the minimization of the prediction-error. Our hypoth- esis, dierent from traditional emotion contagion models, suggests that minimizing the dierence (or prediction-error) between the prediction of others' future action and the cur- rent observation can motivate infants to help others. Despite promising results, we observed that the prediction of others' actions generated strong perspective dierences, which ul- timately diminished the helping performance of our robotic system. To solve this issue, we propose to predict the eects of actions instead of predicting the actions per se. Such an ability to predict the environmental state has been observed in young infants and seems promising to improve the per- formance of our robotic system.
BACKGROUND Atypical sensory behavior disrupts behavioral adaptation in children with autism spect... more BACKGROUND Atypical sensory behavior disrupts behavioral adaptation in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, neural correlates of sensory dysfunction using magnetoencephalography (MEG) remain unclear. METHOD We used MEG to measure the cortical activation elicited by visual (uni)/audiovisual (multisensory) movies in 46 children (7-14 years) were included in final analysis: 13 boys with atypical audiovisual behavior in ASD (AAV+), 10 without this condition, and 23 age-matched typically developing boys. RESULTS The AAV+ group demonstrated an increase in the cortical activation in the bilateral insula in response to unisensory movies and in the left occipital, right superior temporal sulcus (rSTS), and temporal regions to multisensory movies. These increased responses were correlated with severity of the sensory impairment. Increased theta-low gamma oscillations were observed in the rSTS in AAV+. CONCLUSION The findings suggest that AAV is attributed to atypical neural networks centered on the rSTS.
The Workshop on Intermodal Action Structuring, 2008
ABSTRACT Motionese is parental action modification directed to infants versus to adults. Parents ... more ABSTRACT Motionese is parental action modification directed to infants versus to adults. Parents enhance the relevant features in their actions so as to maintain the infants' attention and to aid the infants' processing of the actions. This talk presents our computational analysis on parental actions focusing on the visual struc- turing of them. In order to reveal how parents visually modify their actions and how it can scaold robot's learning as well as infants', we applied a bottom-up visual attention model to the analysis of motionese. The model based on saliency can detect conspicuous locations in a scene in terms of primitive features. That is, it can demonstrate what information can be detected by infants and robots even if they are supposed to have no a priori knowledge about the actions. Our analysis using the saliency model revealed that motionese has the eects of (a) highlighting the initial and final state of objects used in the action, (b) underlining the properties of the objects, and (c) indicating the significant state changes in the action. Parents physically emphasized these aspects by suppressing or adding their body movement. Our further analysis comparing dierent actions uncovered the commonality and uniqueness of motionese depending on the action. The talk also presents our robotics approach to designing an infant-like robot that can induce parent-like teaching of human partners. Open issues in robot action learning are that a robot does not know where to attend when observing an action demonstration, and that only the robot designers can properly teach it actions. We therefore developed a robot simulation equipped with the saliency-based attention model and investigated whether it could encourage naive partners to properly teach it as parents do to infants. Our analysis on the human-robot interaction experiment showed that the robot was accepted as an infant-like social agent.
When interacting with infants, human adults modify their behaviours in an exaggerated manner. Pre... more When interacting with infants, human adults modify their behaviours in an exaggerated manner. Previous studies have demonstrated that infant-directed modification affects the infant's behaviour. However, little is known about how infant-directed modification is elicited during infant-parent interaction. We investigated whether and how the infant's behaviour affects the mother's action during an interaction. We recorded three-dimensional information of cup movements while mothers demonstrated a cup-nesting task during interaction with their infants aged 11 to 13 months. Analyses revealed that spatial characteristics of the mother's task demonstration clearly changed depending on the infant's object manipulation. In particular, the variance in the distance that the cup was moved decreased after the infant's cup nesting and increased after the infant's task-irrelevant manipulation (e.g. cup banging). This pattern was not observed for mothers with 6- to 8-mon...
Robots are less and less programmed to execute a specic behavior, but develop abilities through t... more Robots are less and less programmed to execute a specic behavior, but develop abilities through the interactions with their environment. In our previous studies, we proposed a robotic model for the emergence of helping behavior based on the minimization of the prediction-error. Our hypoth- esis, dierent from traditional emotion contagion models, suggests that minimizing the dierence (or prediction-error) between the prediction of others' future action and the cur- rent observation can motivate infants to help others. Despite promising results, we observed that the prediction of others' actions generated strong perspective dierences, which ul- timately diminished the helping performance of our robotic system. To solve this issue, we propose to predict the eects of actions instead of predicting the actions per se. Such an ability to predict the environmental state has been observed in young infants and seems promising to improve the per- formance of our robotic system.
BACKGROUND Atypical sensory behavior disrupts behavioral adaptation in children with autism spect... more BACKGROUND Atypical sensory behavior disrupts behavioral adaptation in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, neural correlates of sensory dysfunction using magnetoencephalography (MEG) remain unclear. METHOD We used MEG to measure the cortical activation elicited by visual (uni)/audiovisual (multisensory) movies in 46 children (7-14 years) were included in final analysis: 13 boys with atypical audiovisual behavior in ASD (AAV+), 10 without this condition, and 23 age-matched typically developing boys. RESULTS The AAV+ group demonstrated an increase in the cortical activation in the bilateral insula in response to unisensory movies and in the left occipital, right superior temporal sulcus (rSTS), and temporal regions to multisensory movies. These increased responses were correlated with severity of the sensory impairment. Increased theta-low gamma oscillations were observed in the rSTS in AAV+. CONCLUSION The findings suggest that AAV is attributed to atypical neural networks centered on the rSTS.
The Workshop on Intermodal Action Structuring, 2008
ABSTRACT Motionese is parental action modification directed to infants versus to adults. Parents ... more ABSTRACT Motionese is parental action modification directed to infants versus to adults. Parents enhance the relevant features in their actions so as to maintain the infants' attention and to aid the infants' processing of the actions. This talk presents our computational analysis on parental actions focusing on the visual struc- turing of them. In order to reveal how parents visually modify their actions and how it can scaold robot's learning as well as infants', we applied a bottom-up visual attention model to the analysis of motionese. The model based on saliency can detect conspicuous locations in a scene in terms of primitive features. That is, it can demonstrate what information can be detected by infants and robots even if they are supposed to have no a priori knowledge about the actions. Our analysis using the saliency model revealed that motionese has the eects of (a) highlighting the initial and final state of objects used in the action, (b) underlining the properties of the objects, and (c) indicating the significant state changes in the action. Parents physically emphasized these aspects by suppressing or adding their body movement. Our further analysis comparing dierent actions uncovered the commonality and uniqueness of motionese depending on the action. The talk also presents our robotics approach to designing an infant-like robot that can induce parent-like teaching of human partners. Open issues in robot action learning are that a robot does not know where to attend when observing an action demonstration, and that only the robot designers can properly teach it actions. We therefore developed a robot simulation equipped with the saliency-based attention model and investigated whether it could encourage naive partners to properly teach it as parents do to infants. Our analysis on the human-robot interaction experiment showed that the robot was accepted as an infant-like social agent.
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