Abstract
Several studies have shown that the human gaze, but not the robot gaze, has significant effects on infant social cognition and facilitate social engagement. The present study investigates early understanding of the referential nature of gaze by comparing—through the eye-tracking technique—infants’ response to human and robot’s gaze. Data were acquired on thirty-two 17-month-old infants, watching four video clips, where either a human or a humanoid robot performed an action on a target. The agent’s gaze was either turned to the target (congruent) or opposite to it (incongruent). The results generally showed that, independent of the agent, the infants attended longer at the face area compared to the hand and target. Additionally, the effect of referential gaze on infants’ attention to the target was greater when infants watched the human compared to the robot’s action. These results suggest the presence, in infants, of two distinct levels of gaze-following mechanisms: one recognizing the other as a potential interactive partner, the second recognizing partner's agency. In this study, infants recognized the robot as a potential interactive partner, whereas ascribed agency more readily to the human, thus suggesting that the process of generalizability of gazing behaviour to non-humans is not immediate.
Highlights
Several studies have shown that the human gaze, but not the robot gaze, has significant effects on infant social cognition and facilitate social engagement
We explored early understanding of referential gaze toward a target when infants observed either a human or a humanoid robot performing an action toward an object in a gaze-following task[12]
Infants imitate the robot’s goal-directed actions only when the robot first establishes eye contact with an a dult[26]. These findings suggest that the robot gaze may not be as meaningful to the infant as the human gaze, it can be charged of social meaning through a triadic social engagement, where the human adult provides a role model of the relationship
Summary
Several studies have shown that the human gaze, but not the robot gaze, has significant effects on infant social cognition and facilitate social engagement. We explored early understanding of referential gaze toward a target when infants observed either a human or a humanoid robot performing an action toward an object in a gaze-following task[12]. This task resembles the classical visuo-spatial cueing paradigm[13] used to evaluate the process of attention shift, i.e. visuo-spatial orienting[14,15,16], toward the same direction/object/event that another person is attending to. These findings suggest that the robot gaze may not be as meaningful to the infant as the human gaze, it can be charged of social meaning through a triadic social engagement, where the human adult provides a role model of the relationship
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