Skip to Main Content How can human infants gradually socialize
through interaction with their caregivers? This paper presents a
learning mechanism that incrementally acquires social actions by
finding and reproducing the contingency in interaction with a
caregiver. A contingency measure based on transfer entropy is
used to select the appropriate pairs of variables to be
associated to acquire social actions from the set of all
possible pairs. Joint attention behavior is tested to examine
the development of social actions caused by responding to
changes in caregiver behavior due to reproducing the found
contingency. The results of computer simulations of human-robot
interaction indicate that a robot acquires a series of actions
related to joint attention such as gaze following and
alternation in an order that almost matches the infant
development of joint attention found in developmental
psychology. The difference in the order between them is
discussed based on the analysis of robot behavior, and then
future is