Can infants use robot gaze for object learning?

The effect of verbalization

Yuko Okumura | Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan

Yasuhiro Kanakogi | Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University, Japan

Takayuki Kanda | ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Japan

Hiroshi Ishiguro | ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Japan

Shoji Itakura | Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, Japan

Previous research has shown that although infants follow the gaze direction of robots, robot gaze does not facilitate infants’ learning for objects. The present study examined whether robot gaze affects infants’ object learning when the gaze behavior was accompanied by verbalizations. Twelve-month-old infants were shown videos in which a robot with accompanying verbalizations gazed at an object. The results showed that infants not only followed the robot’s gaze direction but also preferentially attended to the cued object when the ostensive verbal signal was present. Moreover, infants showed enhanced processing of the cued object when ostensive and referential verbal signals were increasingly present. These effects were not observed when mere nonverbal sound stimuli instead of verbalizations were added. Taken together, our findings indicate that robot gaze accompanying verbalizations facilitates infants’ object learning, suggesting that verbalizations are important in the design of robot agents from which infants can learn. Keywords: gaze following; humanoid robot; infant learning; verbalization; cognitive development

Published online: 10 June 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.14.3.03oku

Cited by

Cited by 7 other publications

Ishikawa, Mitsuhiko & Shoji Itakura

2019. Physiological arousal predicts gaze following in infants. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 286:1896 ► pp. 20182746 ff.

Lombard, Matthew & Kun Xu

2021. Social Responses to Media Technologies in the 21st Century: The Media are Social Actors Paradigm. Human-Machine Communication 2 ► pp. 29 ff.

Manzi, Federico, Giulia Peretti, Cinzia Di Dio, Angelo Cangelosi, Shoji Itakura, Takayuki Kanda, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Davide Massaro & Antonella Marchetti

2020. A Robot Is Not Worth Another: Exploring Children’s Mental State Attribution to Different Humanoid Robots. Frontiers in Psychology 11

Okumura, Yuko, Yasuhiro Kanakogi, Tessei Kobayashi & Shoji Itakura

2020. Ostension affects infant learning more than attention. Cognition 195 ► pp. 104082 ff.

Park, Yunhee, Shoji Itakura, Annette M.E. Henderson, Takayuki Kanda, Naoki Furuhata & Hiroshi Ishiguro

2015. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, ► pp. 91 ff.

Vivona, Jeanine M.

2019. The Interpersonal Words of the Infant: Implications of Current Infant Language Research for Psychoanalytic Theories of Infant Development, Language, and Therapeutic Action. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 88:4 ► pp. 685 ff.

Wang, Ying, Yun‐Hee Park, Shoji Itakura, Annette Margaret Elizabeth Henderson, Takayuki Kanda, Naoki Furuhata & Hiroshi Ishiguro

2020. Infants' perceptions of cooperation between a human and robot. Infant and Child Development 29:2

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 03 july 2021. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.