“Social” robots are psychological agents for infants: A test of gaze following

Gaze following is a key component of human social cognition. Gaze following directs attention to areas of high information value and accelerates social, causal, and cultural learning. An issue for both robotic and infant learning is whose gaze to follow. The hypothesis tested in this study is that infants use information derived from an entity’s interactions with other agents as evidence about whether that entity is a perceiver. A robot was programmed so that it could engage in communicative, imitative exchanges with an adult experimenter. Infants who saw the robot act in this social-communicative fashion were more likely to follow its line of regard than those without such experience. Infants use prior experience with the robot’s interactions as evidence that the robot is a psychological agent that can see. Infants want to look at what the robot is seeing, and thus shift their visual attention to the external target.