Children and robots learning to play hide and seek

Abstract

How do children learn how to play hide and seek? At age 3-4, children do not typically have perspective taking ability, so their hiding ability should be extremely limited. We show through a case study that a 3 1/2 year old child can, in fact, play a credible game of hide and seek, even though she does not seem to have perspective taking ability. We propose that children are able to learn how to play hide and seek by learning the features and relations of objects (e.g., containment, under) and use that information to play a credible game of hide and seek. We model this hypothesis within the ACT-R cognitive architecture and put the model on a robot, which is able to mimic the child's hiding behavior. We also take the "hiding" model and use it as the basis for a "seeking" model. We suggest that using the same representations and procedures that a person uses allows better interaction between the human and robotic system.