An embodied computational model of social referencing

Abstract

Social referencing is the tendency to use the emotional reaction of another to help form one's own affective appraisal of a novel situation, which is then used to guide subsequent behavior. It is an important form of emotional communication and is a developmental milestone for human infants in their ability to learn about their environment through social means. In this paper, we present a biologically-inspired computational model of social referencing for our expressive, anthropomorphic robot that consists of three interacting systems: emotional empathy through facial imitation, a shared attention mechanism, and an affective memory system. This model presents opportunities for understanding how these mechanisms might interact to enable social referencing behavior in humans.