Contribution of Developmental Psychology to the Study of Social Interactions: Some Factors in Play, Joint Attention and Joint Action and Implications for Robotics

Abstract

Children exchange information through multiple modalities, including verbal communication, gestures and social gaze and they gradually learn to plan their behavior and coordinate successfully with their partners. The development of joint attention and joint action, especially in the context of social play, provides rich opportunities for describing the characteristics of interactions that can lead to shared outcomes. In the present work, we argue that human–robot interactions (HRI) can benefit from these developmental studies, through influencing the human’s perception and interpretation of the robot’s behavior. We thus endeavor to describe some components that could be implemented in the robot to strengthen the feeling of dealing with a social agent, and therefore improve the success of collaborative tasks. Focusing in particular on motor precision, coordination, and anticipatory planning, we discuss the question of complexity in HRI. In the context of joint activities, we highlight the necessity of (1) considering multiple speech acts involving multimodal communication (both verbal and non-verbal signals), and (2) analyzing separately the forms and functions of communication. Finally, we examine some challenges related to robot competencies, such as the issue of language and symbol grounding, which might be tackled by bringing together expertise of researchers in developmental psychology and robotics.

A Systematic Review of Play-Based Interventions Targeting the Social Communication Skills of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Educational Contexts

“…Commonalities were evident across targeted social communication outcomes specifically frequency of social initiations and responses (Loncola & Craig-Unkefer, 2005;Vincent et al, 2018;Watkins et al, 2019b) alongside joint attention and engagement (Chang et al, 2016b;Goods et al, 2013;Lawton & Kasari, 2012). This is surprising given the vast array of social communication skills associated with play for typically developing children including turn-taking and sharing (Anderson-McNamee & Bailey, 2010;Stanton-Chapman & Snell, 2011), collaboration (Rowe et al, 2018;White, 2012;Yogman et al, 2018), negotiation (Bergen & Fromberg, 2009;Hirsh-Pasek et al, 2009;Mraz et al, 2016), theory of mind (Qu et al, 2015) and relational components such as friendships (Coelho et al, 2017;Humphreys & Smith, 1987;Scott & Panksepp, 2003) and peer acceptance (Coelho et al, 2017;Chang et al, 2016a;Flannery & Watson, 1993) as well as communication outcomes such as gestures and body language (Carlson, 2009;Cochet & Guidetti, 2018;Qing, 2011), all skills in which children with ASD may benefit from assistance and support.…”

Maternal attitudes and behaviours differentially shape infant early life experience: A cross cultural study

“…However, when we isolated social play as a key type of social activity [44,[88][89][90][91], we found an unexpected interaction between age and group, with the Ugandan infants maintaining stable low levels of social play across age, and the UK infants showing a significant increase with age. Social play provides important opportunities for facilitating the development of communication and linguistic skills, joint attention, and joint action [88][89][90][91], so whether these group differences in frequency of social play are maintained at later ages, and whether this differential engagement leads to differences in linguistic or social cognition skills requires future investigation [92]. Intriguingly, recent studies suggest linguistic development proceeds at similar rates, regardless of cultural differences in interactional styles [93].…”

El desarrollo de la comunicación preverbal y verbal temprana. La importancia del juego

“…El juego se encuentra presente en todo el ciclo vital de desarrollo, evoluciona conforme el desarrollo del niño y sería propiciador de la interacción triádica, siendo esta habilidad la ventana para la comunicación intencional (Cochet & Guidetti, 2018). El desarrollo comunicacional es entonces la vía primordial que posee el ser humano para ser, y para la construcción de sí mismo que no puede nunca estar desacoplada de un otro.…”

“…Los niños construyen un entendimiento del mundo que los rodea a través del juego. Estudios comparativos llevados a cabo en niños entre uno a dos años dieron cuenta que aquellos que jugaban con sus padres obtuvieron un puntaje mayor en las pruebas de desarrollo del lenguaje (Cochet & Guidetti, 2018).…”