Developmental Construction of Infant’s Gaze Alternation as Intentional Agency

It is pointed out that infants’ gaze alternation, which is a basis of social communication, is related to a developmental process of an intentional agency. The intentional agency is defined as an act composed of a desired goal and a means. It is mentioned that the infants understand others’ intentions based on the intentional agency. In this paper, in order to study an elementaly developmental process of the intentional agency, we constructed a computational model which acquires gaze orientation as a means by the reinforcement learning and gaze alternation between a caregiver and objects as a goal through memorizing sensory states. In the developmental construction of the model, we confirmed that two functions, discrimination and association, play an important role. The former discriminates between the caregiver and the objects in stimuli. The latter associates the caregiver with the objects by storing the relations between sensory states. Comparing infants’ intentional agency with our constructed model, we argue that a nested structure, in which the gaze alternation composed of a goal and a means is utilized as a means to achieve another goal, is an important feature in the developmental process of the intentional agency.