The Science of Imitation | towards Physically and Socially Grounded Intelligence |

Learning From and About Others: Imitation in Humans, Robots, and Animated Characters

We have implemented mimicry of facial expressions in an animated character as a first step towards adding a variety of imitative and social learning abilities to our existing character architecture. Our implementation draws inspiration from, and is heavily grounded in, the child development and comparative psychology literatures on social learning and imitation. Among the key ideas that we draw...

MovieGraphs: Towards Understanding Human-Centric Situations from Videos

There is growing interest in artificial intelligence to build socially intelligent robots. This requires machines to have the ability to “read” people’s emotions, motivations, and other factors that affect behavior. Towards this goal, we introduce a novel dataset called MovieGraphs which provides detailed, graph-based annotations of social situations depicted in movie clips. Each graph consists...

Whistleblowing in the Wind Towards a Socially Situated Research Agenda: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Towards the Development of a Socially-Informed, Process-Oriented Model of Research in Metadiscourse

Since the early development of interest in the interpersonal dimensions of academic communication in the 1980s, the analytic potentials of the concept of metadiscourse have motivated a large number of investigations. Although these analytic potentials have facilitated the study of diverse academic genres, there has always been a risk of detachment of textual analyses form the contextual origins...

The effect of social engagement on 24-month-olds' imitation from live and televised models.

To date, developmental research has rarely addressed the notion that imitation serves an interpersonal, socially based function. The present research thus examined the role of social engagement on 24-month-olds' imitation by manipulating the social availability of the model. In Experiment 1, the children were more likely to imitate the exact actions of a live socially responsive model compared ...