Symposium Preface
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Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts Edited by: José Santos-Victor, Manuel Lopes, Alexandre Bernardino Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2007. Table of Contents page Invited Talks Imitation and self/other distinction, 2 Marcel Brass Imitation of causally-opaque versus causally-transparent tool use by 3- and 5-year-old children, 3 Nicola McGuigan, Andrew Whiten, Emma Flynn, and Victoria Horner Regular Papers From exploration to imitation: using learnt internal models to imitate others, 5 Anthony Dearden, Yiannis Demiris Learning models of camera control for imitation in football matches, 14 Anthony Dearden, Yiannis Demiris, Oliver Grau Imitating the Groove: Making Drum Machines more Human, 19 Axel Tidemann, Yiannis Demiris A unified framework for imitation-like behaviours, 28 Francisco Melo, Manuel Lopes When Training Engenders Failure to Imitate in Grey Parrots, 38 Irene M. Pepperberg Imitative learning in monkeys, 43 Ludwig Huber, Bernhard Voelkl, Friederike Range Visuo-Cognitive Perspective Taking for Action Recognition, 49 Matthew Johnson, Yiannis Demiris Learning by Observation: Comparison of three intuitive methods of embedding mentor's knowledge in 57 reinforcement learning algorithms, Natalia Akchurina Shared Intentional Plans for Imitation and Cooperation: Integrating Clues from Child Development and 66 Neurophysiology into Robotics, Peter Ford Dominey Multiagent Collaborative Task Learning through Imitation, 74 Sonia Chernova, Manuela Veloso Echo State Network Applied to a Robot Control Task, 80 Xavier Dutoit, Davy Sannen, Marnix Nuttin Can Motionese Tells Infants and Robots “What To Imitate”, 86 Yukie Nagai, Katharina J. Rohlfling Short Presentations A Theoretical Consideration on Robotic Imitation of Human Action According to Demonstration plus 95 Suggestion, Masao Yokota Imitation in animals in lack of causal understanding?, 105 Zsófia Virányi Selective imitation in dogs, 106 F Range, Zsófia Virányi, Ludwig Huber Robotic Locust: who is my friend?, 107 Shigang Yue Object Affordances: From Sensory Motor Maps to Imitation, 108 Luis Montesano, Manuel Lopes, Alexandre Bernardino, José Santos-Victor 4th International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts Preface: Imitation facilitates transmitting culture practices and ideas from generation to generation, enabling humans, animals, and now robots, to learn skills others have already mastered. By avoiding the lengthy period of trial-and-error to accomplish new tasks, imitation is thus a very efficient learning method, and also a very intuitive way to program robots by teaching. The mechanisms of imitation and social learning are not well-understood, and the connections to social interaction, communication, development, and learning are deep, as recent research from various disciplines has started to uncover. Comparison of imitation in animals and artifacts reveals that easy tasks for machines can be hard tasks for animals and vice-versa. However, computational complexity issues do not explain, by themselves, the existence or not of imitation behaviours in animals, and the integration of higher level cognitive capabilities like agent’s goals, intentions and emotions, may play a fundamental role in explaining these differences. This interdisciplinary workshop will bring together researchers from neuroscience, brain imaging, animal psychology, computer science and robotics to examine the latest advances to imitation, aiming to further advance our understanding of the underlying mechanisms. We hope that the workshop will contribute to the advance in research in imitation and a better integration between the several scientific disciplines. The symposium will consist of invited talks, regular presentations and short presentations. It is our privilege to have three distinguished invited speakers: Marcel Brass from the Ghent University, Belgium, speaking on the neuronal mechanisms of imitation and Nicola McGuigan from the Heriot-Watt University, Scotland speaking on imitation in children. We would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by euCognition – the European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems and by the EU-Project RobotCub, to all the people who have contributed towards making this symposium happen, the programme review committee and, above all, the authors and participants. José Santos-Victor, Manuel Lopes, Alexandre Bernardino (symposium chairs) Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisboa, Portugal http://vislab.isr.ist.utl.pt Newcastle upon Tyne, April 2007. Support: Symposium Topics: * Cognitive Development and Imitation * Neurobiological Foundations of Imitation * Social interaction and Imitation * Language acquisition * Imitation, Intentionality and Communication * Imitation in Animals * Learning by Imitation to bootstrap the acquisition of skills & knowledge * The Role of Imitation in the Development of Social Cognition * Robot Imitation * Computational mechanisms of imitation * Joint-attention and perspective taking * Cultural transmission of skills * Teaching and scaffolding of behaviours * Imitation and motivation Programme Committee: Alexandre Bernardino, (IST, Portugal) Andrew Meltzoff, (U. Washington, USA) Aris Alissandraiks, (Hertfordshire, UK) Aude Billard, (EPFL, CH) Bart Jansen, (VUB, Belgium) Brian Scassellati, (Yale, USA) Chana Akins, (Kentucky, USA) C. L. Nehaniv, (Hertfordshire, UK) Frédéric Kaplan, (EPFL, Switzerland) Francisco Lacerda, (Stockholm, Sweden) Giorgio Metta, (Genova, IT) Harold Bekkering, (Nijmegen, NL) Heiko Wersing, (Honda R.I., Germany) Irene Pepperberg, (Harvard, USA) Jacqueline Nadel, (CNRS, France) Jochen J. Steil, (Bielefeld, Germany) Joanna Bryson, (Bath, UK) José Santos-Victor, (IST, Portugal) K. Dautenhahn, (Hertfordshire, UK) Ludwig Huber, (Vienna, Austria) Manuel Lopes, (IST, Portugal) Max Lungarella, (Tokyo, JP) Monica Nicolescu, (Nevada, USA) Nicola McGuigan, (St. Andrews, Scotland) Rui Prada, (IST, Portugal) Thomas R. Zentall, (Kentucky, USA) Tony Belpaeme,(Plymouth, UK) Yukie Nagai, (Bielefeld, Germany) Yiannis Demiris,(Imperial College, UK) Invited Talks Imitation and self/other distinction Marcel Brass Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium There is converging evidence from different fields of cognitive neuroscience suggesting that the observation of an action leads to a direct activation of an internal motor representation in the observer. It has been argued that these shared representations form the basis for imitation, action understanding and mentalizing. However, if there is a shared representational system of perception and action, the question arises how we are able to distinguish between intentionally formed motor representations and externally triggered motor plans. I will first outline empirical evidence and theoretical accounts supporting the idea of shared representations. Then I will review neurological data as well as data from social psychology and cognitive neuroscience suggesting that self/other distinction is a crucial requirement of a shared representational system. Finally, I will present recent findings showing that the mechanisms involved in the control of shared representations share neural resources with social cognitive abilities such as action understanding and mentalizing. Taken together, these data point to the fundamental role of self/other distinction in social cognition. Imitation of causally-opaque versus causally-transparent tool use by 3- and 5- year-old children. Nicola McGuigan¹, Andrew Whiten², Emma Flynn², and Victoria Horner² ¹ School of Life Sciences, John Muir Building, Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, EH4 4AS. ² School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JP. We explored whether the tendency to imitate or emulate is influenced by the availability of causal information, or the amount of information available in a display. Three and five-year-old children were shown how to obtain a reward from either a clear or an opaque puzzle-box by a live or video model. Each demonstration involved two different types of actions. The first stage involved causally irrelevant actions and the second stage involved causally relevant actions. When presented with the clear box it could clearly be seen that the actions were irrelevant as the causal information was available. In contrast this information was not available with the opaque box, potentially making discrimination between irrelevant and relevant actions difficult. We predicted that the 3-year-olds would imitate with both boxes, whereas the greater cognitive sophistication and causal understanding of the 5-year-olds would allow them to switch between imitation and emulation depending on the availability of causal information. However, the results showed that both 3-and 5-year-old children imitated the irrelevant actions regardless of the availability of causal information following a live demonstration. In contrast the 3-year-olds employed a more emulative approach when the information available in the display was degraded via a video demonstration containing the puzzle box and the actions of the model only. The results indicated that the 5-year-olds were unaffected by the degraded information and continued to employ an imitative approach. We suggest that imitation is such an adaptive human strategy that it is often employed at the expense of efficiency. Regular Papers From exploration to imitation: using learnt internal models to imitate others Anthony Dearden and Yiannis Demiris1 Abstract. We