How a Cow Catches a Sheep: Is action anticipation in infants based on rationality or frequency?
How a Cow Catches a Sheep: Is action anticipation in infants based on rationality or frequency?
Keywords
Authors
Date
2009-07-07
Language
en
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
The aim of social robotics is to make robots that are integrated in our daily life and
cooperate with humans. For efficient cooperation, the understanding of actions of
other agents is important. In Artificial Intelligence the general assumption is that
humans will perform the actions that are the most rational way to achieve a goal.
Infant studies about action anticipation performed by Gergely, Nádasdy, Csibra and
Bíró, (1995) and Csibra, Gergely, Bíró, Koós and Brockbank (1999) are often cited as
support for the viability of that assumption. The present study, however, investigates
the possibility that action anticipation is based on the frequency of an action instead of
rationality. To test this hypothesis we performed an experiment using a habituation
paradigm in which we measured the looking time as well as the anticipation of 9-
month-old infants when they observed an agent performing one out of two possible
actions. We manipulated the actions insofar as one of the actions was the more
frequent but also more inefficient one, whereas the other was the more efficient but
also more infrequent one. The anticipation measurements showed evidence for the
frequency hypothesis, whereas the looking times provided no evidence for either the
frequency hypothesis or the rationality theory. Therefore, it could be interesting to see
how action models in Artificial Intelligence based on frequency will perform in
comparison with or in cooperation with existing models based on rationality.
Description
Citation
Supervisor
Faculty
Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen