Experiments with a Social Learning Model

We present a system that models perception–action coupling through imitation and attention. Our interest is in imitation and in social learning more generally. Through social learning the experience of an agent is governed by the actions of an expert, and the structures that develop within the agent's “brain” are influenced by its social situatedness. We are inspired from biological findings in primates of the existence of mirror neurons, which are believed to be involved in imitation. The visual and motor properties of these neurons suggest a tight perception–action coupling, where affordances could be expressed. Our system is designed to model the functional properties of the mirror neurons and therefore express the functionality of objects. The system builds up perceptual and motoric structures from experience using temporal attention and forms perceptual-motor connections. The experience arises through imitation, where an agent can perceive objects and the interactions upon them. We have successfully applied our system on three different platforms, two in simulation and the third on a real robot learning from a human. The system is able to segment the perceptual–motor experience into distinct structures that can be used to recognize and reproduce the task in each experiment. Some unexpected results showed us that the motoric complexity in these experiments was not high enough to expose the full potential of our system, and we suggest future work that will address these results.