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Lo studio indaga il ruolo della ToM nel comprendere atti comunicativi di diversa complessità. Si sono somministrati item della Batteria di Assessment per la Comunicazione e test ToM a 120 bambini (3-8 anni). I dati mostrano trend di difficoltà crescente nel gestire i diversi compiti pragmatici e una correlazione tra ToM e performance pragmatiche; tuttavia, la sola ToM non spiega la varianza dei risultati, meglio spiegata dalla crescente complessità inferenziale sottostante i compiti pragmatici.

It is common wisdom in the area of adult education that the educator's relational attitudes influence knowledge construction on the part of the learners. It is the aim of this paper to contribute to an empirical evaluation of this idea. We identified four basic relational attitudes of the educator's, namely: (i) favoring cooperation, (ii) directivity, (iii) flexibility, and (iv) ability to focus on the participants. Then, we identified 31 prototypical types of behavior that are commonly enacted by educators in the classroom. We performed multiple observations of several adult education courses, scoring each educator on the list of 31 behavior types. We performed factor analysis and then correlated such scores and the corresponding attitudes to indexes of the participants' levels of attention, participation and comprehension. The results corroborate our hypotheses. Interestingly, several differences was found between novice and expert teachers. Overall, our findings support the socio-constructivist idea that knowing is a transformational process of learning that takes place within a relational context.

It is hypothesized that creativity arises from the self-mending capacity of an internal model of the world, or worldview. The uniquely honed worldview of a creative individual results in a distinctive style that is recognizable within and across domains. It is further hypothesized that creativity is domaingeneral in the sense that there exist multiple avenues by which the distinctiveness of one’s worldview can be expressed. These hypotheses were tested using art students and creative writing students. Art students guessed significantly above chance both which painting was done by which of five famous artists, and which artwork was done by which of their peers. Similarly, creative writing students guessed significantly above chance both which passage was written by which of five famous writers, and which passage was written by which of their peers. These findings support the hypothesis that creative style is recognizable. Moreover, creative writing students guessed significantly above chance which of their peers produced particular works of art, supporting the hypothesis that creative style is recognizable not just within but across domains.

The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the developmental process has been shaped by a yet larger evolutionary dynamic that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary dynamic has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the developmental process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition.

According to recent studies in developmental psychology and neuroscience, symbolic language is essentially intersubjective. Empathetically relating to others renders possible the acquisition of linguistic constructs. Intersubjectivity develops in early ontogenetic life when interactions between mother and infant mutually shape their relatedness. Empirical findings suggest that the shared attention and intention involved in those interactions is sustained as it becomes internalized and embodied. Symbolic language is derivative and emerges from shared intentionality. In this paper, we present a formalization of shared intentionality based upon a quantum approach. From a phenomenological viewpoint, we investigate the nonseparable, dynamic and sustainable nature of social cognition and evaluate the appropriateness of quantum interaction for modelling intersubjectivity.

The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the developmental process has been shaped by a larger evolutionary process that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary process has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and develop to produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the evolutionary process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition.

The essay is critically examines the conceptual problems with the influential modularity model of mind. We shall see that one of the essential characters of modules, namely informational encapsulation, is not only inessential, it ties a knot at a crucial place blocking the solution to the problem of understanding the formation of concepts from percepts (nodes of procedural knowledge). Subsequently I propose that concept formation takes place by modulation of modules leading to cross-representations, which were otherwise prevented by encapsulation. It must be noted that the argument is not against modular architecture, but a variety of an architecture that prevents interaction among modules. This is followed by a brief argument demonstrating that module without modularization, i.e. without developmental history, is impossible. Finally the emerging picture of cognitive development is drawn in the form of the layers in the fabric of mind, with a brief statement of the possible implications.

We used a multilevel growth model to describe the developmental trajectories of infant’s coordinated attention between people and objects between 7 and 10 months of age. Additionally, we assed whether the coordinated attention looks were accompanied by smiles as infants interacted social partners. These results confirm the emergence of visual joint attention skills before the end of the first year. These results will be useful in the construction of robotic systems that engage in joint attention.

Children with autism have difficulties in social interaction with other people and much attention in recent years has been directed to robots as therapy tools. We studied the social interaction between children with autism and robots longitudinally to observe developmental changes in their performance. We observed children at a special school for six months and analyzed their performance with robots. The results showed that two children adapted to the experimental situations and developed interaction with the robots. This suggests that they changed their interaction with the robots from an object-like one into an agentlike one.

We describe a set of experiments investigating the role of natural language symbols in scaffolding situated action. Agents are evolved to respond appropriately to commands in order to perform simple tasks. We explore three different conditions, which show a significant advantage to the re-use of a public symbol system, through self-cueing leading to qualitative changes in performance. This is modelled by looping spoken output via environment back to heard input. We argue this work can be linked to, and sheds new light on, the account of self-directed speech advanced by the developmental psychologist Vygotsky in his model of the development of higher cognitive function.

Social robots recognize and respond to human social cues with appropriate behaviors. Social robots, and the technology used in their construction, can be unique tools in the study of abnormal social development. Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder that is characterized by social and communicative impairments. Based on three years of integration and immersion with a clinical research group which performs more than 130 diagnostic evaluations of children for autism per year, this paper discusses how social robots will make an impact on the ways in which we diagnose, treat, and understand autism.

We propose ongoing emergence as a core concept in epigenetic robotics. Ongoing emergence refers to the continuous development and integration of new skills and is exhibited when six criteria are satisfied: (1) continuous skill acquisition, (2) incorporation of new skills with existing skills, (3) autonomous development of values and goals, (4) bootstrapping of initial skills, (5) stability of skills, and (6) reproducibility. In this paper we: (a) provide a conceptual synthesis of ongoing emergence based on previous theorizing, (b) review current research in epigenetic robotics in light of ongoing emergence, (c) provide prototypical examples of ongoing emergence from infant development, and (d) outline computational issues relevant to creating robots exhibiting ongoing emergence.

This paper presents results from experimental studies on early language acquisition in infants and attempts to interpret the experimental results within the framework of the Ecological Theory of Language Acquisition (ETLA) recently proposed by (Lacerda et al., 2004a). From this perspective, the infant’s first steps in the acquisition of the ambient language are seen as a consequence of the infant’s general capacity to represent sensory input and the infant’s interaction with other actors in its immediate ecological environment. On the basis of available experimental evidence, it will be argued that ETLA offers a productive alternative to traditional descriptive views of the language acquisition process by presenting an operative model of how early linguistic function may emerge through interaction.

This article reviews two reflexive motor patterns in humans: Primitive reflexes and motor primitives. Both terms coexist in the literature of motor development and motor control, yet they are not synonyms. While primitive reflexes are a part of the temporary motor repertoire in early ontogeny, motor primitives refer to sets of motor patterns that are considered basic units of voluntary motor control thought to be present throughout the life-span. The article provides an overview of the anatomy and neurophysiology of human reflexive motor patterns to elucidate that both concepts are rooted in architecture of the spinal cord. I will advocate that an understanding of the human motor system that encompasses both primitive reflexes and motor primitives as well as the interaction with supraspinal motor centers will lead to an appreciation of the richness of the human motor repertoire, which in turn seems imperative for designing epigenetic robots and highly adaptable human machine interfaces.

We present a Perception-Action architecture and experiments to simulate imprinting—the establishment of strong attachment links with a “caregiver”—in a robot. Following recent theories, we do not consider imprinting as rigidly timed and irreversible, but as a more flexible phenomenon that allows for further adaptation as a result of reward-based learning through experience. Our architecture reconciles these two types of perceptual learning traditionally considered as different and even incompatible. After the initial imprinting, adaptation is achieved in the context of a history of “affective” interactions between the robot and a human, driven by “distress” and “comfort” responses in the robot.

A model of gaze control is describes that includes mechanisms for predictive control using a forward model and event driven expectations of target behavior. The model roughly undergoes stages similar to those of human infants if the influence of the predictive systems is gradually increased.

A computational model of children's semantic memory is built from the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) of a multisource child corpus. Three tests of the model are described, simulating a vocabulary test, an association test and a recall task. For each one, results from experiments with children are presented and compared to the model data. Adequacy is correct, which means that this simulation of children's semantic memory can be used to simulate a variety of children's cognitive processes.

Synchrony detection between different sensory and/or motor channels appears critically important for young infant learning and cognitive development. For example, empirical studies demonstrate that audio-visual synchrony aids in language acquisition. In this paper we compare these infant studies with a model of synchrony detection based on the Hershey and Movellan (2000) algorithm augmented with methods for quantitative synchrony estimation. Four infant-model comparisons are presented, using audio-visual stimuli of increasing complexity. While infants and the model showed learning or discrimination with each type of stimuli used, the model was most successful with stimuli comprised of one audio and one visual source, and also with two audio sources and a dynamic-face visual motion source. More difficult for the model were stimuli conditions with two motion sources, and more abstract visual dynamics—an oscilloscope instead of a face. Future research should model the developmental pathway of synchrony detection. Normal audio-visual synchrony detection in infants may be experience-dependent (e.g., Bergeson, et al., 2004).

This poster presents a study of the linguistic information potentially available in adult speech directed to 3-month-old infants. The repetitive nature of the speech directed to young infants and the ecological context of the adult-infant natural interaction setting are analyzed in the light of the “Ecological theory of language acquisition” proposed by Lacerda et al. (2004, this volume). The analysis of transcripts of adult-infant interaction sessions suggests that enough information to derive general noun associations may be available as a consequence of the particular context of the adult-infant interactions during the early stages of the language acquisition process.

This poster outlines an Ecological Theory of Language Acquisition (ETLA). The theory views the early phases of the language acquisition process as an emergent consequence of the interaction between the infant and its linguistic environment. The newborn infant is considered to be linguistically and phonetically naïve but endowed with the ability to register a wide range of multi-sensory inputs along with the ability to detect similarity between the multi-sensory stimuli it is exposed to. The initial steps of the language acquisition process are explained as unintended and inevitable consequences of the infant’s multisensory interaction with the adult. The theoretical model deriving from ETLA is tested using the experimental data presented in the two additional contributions from our research team (Gustavsson et al, “Integration of audiovisual information in 8-months-old infants”; Lacerda, Marklund et al. “On the linguistic implications of context-bound adult-infant interactions”). The generality of the ETLA’s concept is likely to be of significance for a wide range of scientific areas, like robotics, where a central issue concerns addressing general problems of how organisms or systems might develop the ability to tap on the structure of the information embedded in their operating environments.

What is the relationship between development of the nervous system and the emergence of voluntary motor behavior? This is the central question of the nature-nurture discussion that has intrigued child psychologists and pediatric neurologists for decades. This paper attempts to revisit this issue. Recent empirical evidence on how infants acquire multi-joint coordination and how children learn to adapt to novel force environments will be discussed with reference to the underlying development of the nervous system. The claim will be made that the developing human nervous system by no means constitutes an ideal controller. However, its redundancy, its ability to integrate multi-modal sensory information and motor commands and its facility of time-critical neural plasticity are features that may prove to be useful for the design of adaptive robots.

This paper discusses the concept of joint attention and the different skills underlying its development. We argue that joint attention is much more than gaze following or simultaneous looking because it implies a shared intentional relation to the world. The current state-of-the-art in robotic and computational models of the different prerequisites of joint attention is discussed in relation with a developmental timeline drawn from results in child studies.

Sensitivity to timing in interaction was assessed in mother-infant interaction. In Study 1, three-month-old infants were presented with an image of their mother interacting with them on television, which was either live or temporally delayed by 1 second. Infants detected the temporal delay and were more attentive when the mother was presented live compared to delayed by 1 second. In Study 2, mothers interacted with an image of their three-month-old infant, which was either live or temporally delayed by 1 second. Mothers did not respond to a 1-second delay in their infants' behavior. In Study 3 and 4, the results were replicated with six-month-old infants.

The results from a series of perception experiments designed to test 8-month-old infants’ ability to derive linguistic information from audio-visual events are reported in this presentation. Using a visual preference technique, groups of 8-month-old infants were tested on their ability to extract linguistic information implicit in short video sequences where the images displayed different puppets and the audio tracks presented sentences describing the puppets in naturalistic infant-directed speech style. To assess the relative importance of memory and attention factors, the prosodic and syntactic structure of the speech materials was systematically changed across different groups of subjects. The experimental results are interpreted in terms of the emergentistic acquisition model discussed in the paper presented by Lacerda et al. (“Ecological theory of language acquisition”).

As in the previous editions, this workshop is trying to be a forum for multi-disciplinary research ranging from developmental psychology to neural sciences (in its widest sense) and robotics including computational studies. This is a two-fold aim of, on the one hand, understanding the brain through engineering embodied systems and, on the other hand, building artificial epigenetic systems. Epigenetic contains in its meaning the idea that we are interested in studying development through interaction with the environment. This idea entails the embodiment of the system, the situatedness in the environment, and of course a prolonged period of postnatal development when this interaction can actually take place. This is still a relatively new endeavor although the seeds of the developmental robotics community were already in the air since the nineties (Berthouze and Kuniyoshi, 1998; Metta et al., 1999; Brooks et al., 1999; Breazeal, 2000; Kozima and Zlatev, 2000). A few had the intuition – see Lungarella et al. (2003) for a comprehensive review – that, intelligence could not be possibly engineered simply by copying systems that are “ready made” but rather that the development of the system fills a major role. This integration of disciplines raises the important issue of learning on the multiple scales of developmental time, that is, how to build systems that eventually can learn in any environment rather than program them for a specific environment. On the other hand, the hope is that robotics might become a new tool for brain science similarly to what simulation and modeling have become for the study of the motor system. Our community is still pretty much evolving and “under construction” and for this reason, we tried to encourage submissions from the psychology community. Additionally, we invited four neuroscientists and no roboticists for the keynote lectures. We received a record number of submissions (more than 50), and given the overall size and duration of the workshop together with our desire to maintain a single-track format, we had to be more selective than ever in the review process (a 20% acceptance rate on full papers). This is, if not an index of quality, at least an index of the interest that gravitates around this still new discipline.

A computational model with three interacting components for context sensitive reinforcement learning, context processing and automation can autonomously learn a focus attention and a shift attention task. The performance of the model is similar to that of normal children, and when a single parameter is changed, the performance on the two tasks approaches that of autistic children.

This paper presents developmental learning on a humanoid robot from human-robot interactions. We consider in particular teaching humanoids as children during the child's Separation and Individuation developmental phase (Mahler, 1979). Cognitive development during this phase is characterized both by the child's dependence on her mother for learning while becoming awareness of her own individuality, and by self-exploration of her physical surroundings. We propose a learning framework for a humanoid robot inspired on such cognitive development.

The paper provides a summary of our recent research on preverbal infants (using violation-of-expectation and observational learning paradigms) demonstrating that one-year-olds interpret and draw systematic inferences about other’s goal-directed actions, and can rely on such inferences when imitating other’s actions or emulating their goals. To account for these findings it is proposed that one-year-olds apply a non-mentalistic action interpretational system, the ’teleological stance’ that represents actions by relating relevant aspects of reality (action, goal-state, and situational constraints) through the principle of rational action, which assumes that actions function to realize goal-states by the most efficient means available in the actor’s situation. The relevance of these research findings and the proposed theoretical model for how to realize the goal of epigenetic robotics of building a ’socially relevant’ humanoid robot is discussed.

This paper summarizes the paper and poster contributions to the Third International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics. The focus of this workshop is on the cross-disciplinary interaction of developmental psychology and robotics. Namely, the general goal in this area is to create robotic models of the psychological development of various behaviors. The term "epigenetic" is used in much the same sense as the term "developmental" and while we could call our topic "developmental robotics", developmental robotics can be seen as having a broader interdisciplinary emphasis. Our focus in this workshop is on the interaction of developmental psychology and robotics and we use the phrase "epigenetic robotics" to capture this focus.

In this presentation I use recent empirical evidence and theoretical analyses concerning the importance of language in consciousness. Preliminary clinical and neuropsychological data indicate that inner speech is deeply linked to self-awareness; also, four hypotheses concerning the crucial role inner speech plays in self-focus are presented. I conclude by proposing that genuine consciousness (i.e., self-awareness) is impossible without language.

Starting with fewer degrees of freedom has been shown to enable a more efficient exploration of the sensorimotor space. While not necessarily leading to optimal task performance, it results in a smaller number of directions of stability, which guide the coordination of additional degrees of freedom. The developmental release of additional degrees of freedom is then expected to allow for optimal task performance and more tolerance and adaptation to environmental interaction. In this paper, we test this assumption with a small-sized humanoid robot that learns to swing under environmental perturbations. Our experiments show that a progressive release of degrees of freedom alone is not sufficient to cope with environmental perturbations. Instead, alternate freezing and freeing of the degrees of freedom is required. Such finding is consistent with observations made during transitional periods in acquisition of skills in infants.

In discussions of the ontogenetic origins of numerical abilities to date, most of the research suggests that infants establish representations of numbers of objects presented visually, auditorily, and haptically. The question is not whether babies are sensitive to differences in number. The focus lies on what models can better account for the wealth of data. Some have suggested that the infant number capacity is in the format of object file representations, and is characterized by a small set size - ones, twos, threes, perhaps fours, predicted by limitations of short-term storage of an object file model (Uller et al., 1999). Others have proposed that the infant counting abilities are in the format of analog representations, roughly in a format comparable to that of rats and pigeons (Xu & Spelke 2000), where limit is not a concern. The task is to bring data to bear on this question to help decide between the two alternative models. Uller and Leslie (2000) began to address this issue. Utilizing the looking time technique, they showed 12- month-olds 2+1 and 2+0 event where two objects go behind a screen, then either 1 is added or 0 is added. The outcome is always 2. Another group of 12-month-olds see parallel events with 3, namely, 3+1 and 3+0. Babies are able to understand 'exactly 2', but not 'exactly 3', which provides support for an object file model. More recently, Uller (2001) investigated whether 12-month-olds understand exactly two using reaching and searching time as dependent measures. Twelve-month-old infants were shown 2 objects go into a box, then either a third one being added (2+1) or nothing being added (2+0) into the box. The outcome was always 2. In this study, she confirmed Uller and Leslie's (2000) looking time findings that 12-month-olds understand what 'exactly two' means. Parallel results were found by Feigenson, Carey & Hauser (in press) in a forced choice experiment testing 10- and 12-month-old infants. Here, babies had to choose between different numbers of graham crackers, namely, 2 vs 3, 3 vs 4, and 3 vs 6. The researchers found that babies only chose the bigger number in the small discrimination cases. When they saw 3 vs 6 and 4 vs 6, they randomly picked one or the other. In the current paper, I make the case for focusing on the young infant capacity for small number representation. I will argue that this is a capacity that can be found spontaneously in humans, nonhuman primates, avians and even lower vertebrates. I will also argue that this is a capacity that should be considered primitive and foundational, perhaps at the core of cognition. I will review the proposals available to date on the young infant representation of small number, and examine possible implementations that can be derived from these considerations.

Young children perform well on a wide range of tasks involving the attribution of goals/desires. For instance, two- and three-year old children are told that a boy wants to find his rabbit, which is in one of two locations. If the puppet fails to find the rabbit in the first location, children predict that he will look in the second location; if the puppet finds the rabbit in the first location, however, children predict that he will not look in the second location (Wellman and Woolley 1990). Although there is plenty of evidence that children can reason about other people’s desires, the origins of this ability is still very much unknown. In one study, Repacholi and Gopnik (1997) studied 18-month old children in a food-request procedure in which they asked whether the children could correctly understand people’s desires by predicting specific reactions to desired/undesired objects. The children saw the experimenter express disgust as she tasted one kind of food, and happiness as she tasted a different kind of food. They were then asked to give the experimenter some food. The children correctly gave her the food towards which she had expressed positive affect. This led researchers to conclude that the children not only inferred that another person held a desire, but they also recognized how desires relate to emotions. More recently, researchers have looked at the origins of other people’s mental states in even younger infants using visual attention measures. For instance, Woodward (1998) has presented results that indicate that 12-month-old infants detect goals. The origins of subjective desire, however, is still an open question. Here we proposed to start addressing the issue of subjective desire in young infants. In this task, thirty-two 10- and 11-month-old infants are familiarized with two scenarios. In (1), infants see the experimenter express disgust towards cracker/broccoli (‘yuk’), and in (2), infants see the experimenter express happiness towards broccoli/cracker (‘wow’). After the familiarization phase, the infants are then tested in one of two outcomes, the experimenter has a neutral expression and either grabs the broccoli, or the cracker. Parental reports on infants’ preferences are obtained to check their behavior against their performance in the task. If the infants have a psychological understanding of subjective desire, then they will expect the experimenter to grab the food towards which she expressed positive affect; if, on the other hand, the infants only have a behavioral understanding of desire, then they will be unable to determine the object of the experimenter’s desire because no specific cues are provided in the test phase. They will tend to respond egocentrically, and give the experimenter what they themselves like. Preliminary results reveal that 10- and 11-month-old infants will look longer when the experimenter grabs the object towards which she expressed disgust. Data collection continues. Further steps towards the characterization of such ability are discussed.

The concept of ‘social situatedness’, i.e. the idea that the development of individual intelligence requires a social (and cultural) embedding, has recently received much attention in cognitive science and artificial intelligence research. The work of Lev Vygotsky who put forward this view already in the 1920s has influenced the discussion to some degree, but still remains far from well known. This paper therefore aims to give an overview of his cognitive development theory and discuss its relation to more recent work in primatology and socially situated artificial intelligence, in particular humanoid robotics.

In this paper, we build upon the idea of theory grounding and propose one specific form of theory grounding, a theory of language. Theory grounding is the idea that we can imbue our embodied artificially intelligent systems with theories by modeling the way humans, and specifically young children, develop skills with theories. Modeling theory development promises to increase the conceptual and behavioral flexibility of these systems. An example of theory development in children is the social understanding referred to as “theory of mind.” Language is a natural task for theory grounding because it is vital in symbolic skills and apparently necessary in developing theories. Word learning, and specifically developing a concept of words, is proposed as the first step in a theory grounded theory of language.