Modeling a Social Brain for Interactive Agents: Integrating Mirroring and Mentalizing

Human interaction has a distinct collaborative quality based on the attribution of communicative intentionality. Two networks in the human brain are often described as part of the “social brain”: the mirror system for recognizing intentional behavior and the mentalizing (theory of mind) system for processing it. We equip virtual agents with both systems and model their interaction during embodied communication. Results of simulation experiments demonstrate how higher orders of theory of mind lead to more robustness of communication by enabling interactive grounding processes.

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