Study on mindreading mechanism in robot, nonhuman primates and human.

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In this research project, mechanism of mindreading system was investigated. We added the perspective of cognitive developmental robotics to comparative cognitive science in which usually the subjects were human and nonhuman primates or other animal. At first, we focused on visual attention shift in human infants, human adults, and chimpanzees. The deictic cue such as face like line drawing, photograph of face, was presented on the computer screen or card board and subjects' eye movement was observed. We found that even human infants and chimpanzees showed automatically attention shift as well as human adults. We concluded this kind of basic mechanism underlie in joint visual attention, that is higher order social cognitive ability. We also used "an arrow" as a deictic stimulus, and found it is very effective for visual attention shift. We had an hypothesis that asymmetry stimulus is effective in attention shift, and carried out the experiment. Asymmetry stimuli were seemed to be effective to induce visual attention shift. That is reasonable, because eye movement or orientation of human face are asymmetry. In humanoid robot, we conducted the experiment for imitation of human action.We carried out the experiments from the point of view of understanding of other's knowledge. Participants were 3, 4, 5, and 6-year-olds. Usually 3-year-olds cannot understand the association between seeing and knowing. However, we found that even 3-year-olds understand the person who have a knowledge acquired through the interaction by observing interaction between the experimenters.