creators_name: Gergely, György editors_name: Prince, Christopher G. editors_name: Berthouze, Luc editors_name: Kozima, Hideki editors_name: Bullock, Daniel editors_name: Stojanov, Georgi editors_name: Balkenius, Christian type: confpaper datestamp: 2004-02-12 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:27 metadata_visibility: show title: What should a robot learn from an infant? Mechanisms of action interpretation and observational learning in infancy ispublished: pub subjects: dev-psy subjects: comp-sci-robot full_text_status: public keywords: teleological stance, goal-directd action, violaiton of expectation, non-mentatlistic action interpretation abstract: 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. date: 2003 date_type: published volume: 101 publisher: Lund University Cognitive Studies pagerange: 13-24 refereed: TRUE citation: Gergely, György (2003) What should a robot learn from an infant? Mechanisms of action interpretation and observational learning in infancy. [Conference Paper] document_url: http://cogprints.org/3365/1/Gergely.pdf