Contribution of Developmental Psychology to the Study of Social Interactions: Some Factors in Play, Joint Attention and Joint Action and Implications for Robotics—Cochet 2016

Children learn to organize and coordinate their behavior via verbal communication, gestures, and social gaze. Joint attention and action, particularly in social play, allow possibilities to describe interactions that might lead to shared consequences. Human-robot interactions (HRI) may benefit from developmental research through altering human perception and interpretation of robot behavior. We explain components that may be added to a robot to make it seem more sociable and better collaborative work. We address HRI complexity, focusing on motor accuracy, synchronization, and anticipatory planning. In the context of joint activities, we emphasize (1) assessing numerous speech actions including multimodal communication (verbal and non-verbal signals) and (2) analyzing communication forms and functions individually. Finally, we investigate various issues connected to robot abilities, such as language and symbol grounding, which may be addressed by combining developmental psychology and robotics.

Cochet, H., & Guidetti, M. (2018). Contribution of Developmental Psychology to the Study of Social Interactions: Some Factors in Play, Joint Attention and Joint Action and Implications for Robotics. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1992. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01992