Towards Language Acquisition by an Attention-Sharing Robot

This paper describes our preliminary research on "attention-sharing" in infants' language acquisition. Attention-sharing is the activity of paying one's attention to someone else's attentional target. This enables one to observe others' sensory-input (what they are perceiving from the target) and motor-output (what they are doing in response to the target). Being inspired by lack of attention-sharing in autistic children, we assumed that observation of others' behavior by attention-sharing plays an indispensable role in symbol acquisition. As a test-bed for attention-sharing, we are developing a robot that can follow people's attentional targets by means of monitoring their gaze-direction.