Robot Science Meets Social Science: An Embodied Computational Model of Social Referencing

Social referencing is the tendency to use the emotional reaction of another to help form one's own affective appraisal of a novel situation, which is then used to guide subsequent behavior. It is an important form of emotional communication and is a developmental milestone for human infants in their ability to learn about their environment through social means. In this paper, we present a biologically-inspired computational model of social referencing for our expressive, anthropomorphic robot. Our model consists of three interacting systems: emotional empathy through facial imitation, a shared attention mechanism, and an affective memory system. These systems interact to enable the robot to demonstrate social referencing behavior similar to that of human infants. We argue that in addition to forming a basis for social learning in robots, our model presents opportunities for understanding how these mechanisms might interact to enable social referencing behavior in humans.