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About

Yuko Okumura is a leading developmental psychologist whose research lies at the intersection of infant cognition, social learning, and human-robot interaction. Her work fundamentally explores how infants and young children interpret social cues—particularly gaze—to learn about the world. In her highly cited 2013 study (79 citations), she demonstrated the unique power of human gaze in facilitating infant learning, establishing a critical baseline for comparing human and artificial agents. A landmark companion paper (58 citations) revealed a crucial developmental insight: while infants follow the gaze of both humans and robots, only human gaze carries referential meaning for them. This finding has profound implications for designing educational technologies. Okumura extended this line of inquiry by testing whether robot gaze paired with verbalizations could enhance object learning (26 citations). More recently, her work has shifted to older children, showing in a 2023 study (21 citations) that 5-year-olds care about their reputation even when interacting with a social robot—a finding with urgent implications for child-robot relationships in an increasingly automated world. Her research elegantly bridges developmental theory and robotics, offering essential insights into how children navigate social learning across human and artificial partners.