Can Motionese Tell Infants and Robots “ What to Imitate ” ?

An open question in imitating actions by infants and robots is how they know “what to imitate.” We suggest that parental modifications in their actions, called motionese, can help infants and robots to detect the meaningful structure of the actions. Parents tend to modify their infant-directed actions, e.g., put longer pauses between actions and exaggerate actions, which are assumed to help infants to understand the meaning and the structure of the actions. To investigate how such modifications contribute to the infants’ understanding of the actions, we analyzed parental actions from an infantlike viewpoint by applying a model of saliency-based visual attention. Our model of an infant-like viewpoint does not suppose any a priori knowledge about actions or objects used in the actions, or any specific capability to detect a parent’s face or his/her hands. Instead, it is able to detect and gaze at salient locations, which are standing out from the surroundings because of the primitive visual features, in a scene. The model thus demonstrates what low-level aspects of parental actions are highlighted in their action sequences and could attract the attention of young infants and robots. Our quantitative analysis revealed that motionese can help them (1) to receive immediate social feedback on the actions, (2) to detect the initial and goal states of the actions, and (3) to look at the static features of the objects used in the actions. We discuss these results addressing the issue of “what to imitate.”