Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A proper representation of space and a joint attention mecha-nism are indispensable for an effective deictic communicationwith embodied agents. Taking inspiration from developmen-tal psychology may help us to tackle computational challengesfor robots. Although some developmental joint attention mod-els for robots have already been proposed, to the best of ourknowledge, there is no such model that can stand for the ef-fects of pointing gestures on covert attention in infants. Thuswe have designed and implemented a developmental roboticsmodel for joint spatial attention combining connectionist anddynamical approaches. The hybrid architecture was struc-tured over two existing computational models: a connectionistmodel of gesture comprehension and a Dynamic Field (DF)model of spatial attention in infants. These models were ex-tended with various perceptual modules and dynamical neu-ral fields, and implemented on the state-of-art iCub humanoidrobot. In this paper, the computational architecture is intro-duced with some preliminary results that show the model’s ca-pability of representing deixis and perceived objects, and theireffects on attention over space and time.