The emergence of embodied communication in artificial agents and humans

Abstract

This chapter discusses the emergence of new communication systems and their expansion and adaptation in usage. It presents studies that focus exclusively on the mapping from meaning to form and from form to meaning. It discusses how the methodology is extended to consider the whole system involved in successful communication: from perception to language and from language to real world action in embodied agents. It also compares experiments on robotic modeling of emergent embodied communication with the empirical data coming from experiments with human subjects. Both lines of research provide exciting new evidence that abstract communication can emerge from concrete, practical interactions.