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Abstract From birth, human and nonhuman primates attend more to faces with direct gaze compared with averted gaze, and previous studies report that attention to the eyes is linked to the emergence of later social skills. Here, we explored whether early experiences influence attraction to eye contact in infant macaques by examining their attention to face pairs varying in their gaze direction across the first 13 weeks of life. Infants raised by human caretakers had limited conspecific interactions (nursery‐reared;N = 16) and were compared to infants raised in rich social environments (mother‐reared;N = 20). Both groups looked longer to faces and the eyes of direct compared to averted‐gaze faces. Looking to all faces and eyes also increased with age. Nursery‐reared infants did not display age‐associated increases in attention to direct‐gaze faces specifically, suggesting that, while there may be an initial preference for direct‐gaze faces from birth, social experiences may support its early development.
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Surprise! Predicting Infant Visual Attention in a Socially Assistive Robot Contingent Learning Paradigm
Early intervention to address developmental disability in infants has the potential to promote improved outcomes in neurodevelopmental structure and function [1]. Researchers are starting to explore Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) as a tool for delivering early interventions that are synergistic with and enhance human-administered therapy. For SAR to be effective, the robot must be able to consistently attract the attention of the infant in order to engage the infant in a desired activity. This work presents the analysis of eye gaze tracking data from five 6-8 month old infants interacting with a Nao robot that kicked its leg as a contingent reward for infant leg movement. We evaluate a Bayesian model of lowlevel surprise on video data from the infants’ head-mounted camera and on the timing of robot behaviors as a predictor of infant visual attention. The results demonstrate that over 67% of infant gaze locations were in areas the model evaluated to be more surprising than average. We also present an initial exploration using surprise to predict the extent to which the robot attracts infant visual attention during specific intervals in the study. This work is the first to validate the surprise model on infants; our results indicate the potential for using surprise to inform robot behaviors that attract infant attention during SAR interactions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1706964
- PAR ID:
- 10354827
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ro-Man 2019- International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN46459.2019.8956385
