To each his own: The caregiver's role in a computational model of gaze following

We investigate a computational model of the emergence of gaze following that is based on a generic basic set of mechanisms. Whereas much attention has been focused so far on the study of the infant's behavior, we systematically analyze the caregiver and show that he plays a crucial role in the development of gaze following in our model, especially for infant models with simulated developmental disorders such as autism and Williams syndrome. We first create two reference infant parameter sets and test their behavior with a simple standard caregiver. Based on these findings we then propose new caregiver models and evaluate them on normally developing infants and on infants with simulated developmental disorders. Further, we investigate if and how a pair of infants (with and without simulated developmental disorders) might learn gaze following from scratch, without a mature caregiver.The findings of this paper suggest the pivotal role the caregiver plays for the infant in developing gaze following, that his predictability is the most important criterion, and that different infant models require particular caregivers for gaze following to emerge optimally. Our simulations are consistent with Leekam's finding, that autistics can learn to follow gaze through a contingent presentation of rewarding visual stimuli, but that a lack of motivation may impede learning.