Investigating the emergence of shared attention through an embodied computational modeling approach: a progress report

Summary form only given. We present a simple computational model of the emergence of gaze following behavior in infant caregiver interactions. We regard gaze following as a skill that infants acquire because they learn that monitoring their caregiver's direction of gaze allows them to predict where interesting objects/events in their environment are (Moore, 1996). In particular, we propose a specific "basic set" of mechanisms that are sufficient for gaze following to emerge (Fasel and Deak, 2002). This basic set comprises perceptual and motivational biases and habituation mechanisms driving the infant to look at and shift attention between "interesting" visual stimuli, a generic learning mechanism that learns behavioral strategies to satisfy these preferences, and a structured environment providing correlations between where caregivers look and where interesting stimuli are. We formalize these ideas in a simple model based on temporal difference learning. We analyze the model and demonstrate that a) the proposed basic set of mechanisms is indeed sufficient for gaze following to emerge and b) alterations of parameters of some of the basic set mechanisms motivated by findings on developmental disorders lead to impairments in the learning of gaze following that are typical of these disorders.