UC San Diego

Naturalistic observations of infant/caregiver social attention have yielded rich information about human social develop- ment. However, observational data are expensive, laborious, and reliant on fallible human coders. We model interactions between caregivers and infants using a three dimensional sim- ulation environment in order to gain greater insight into the development of infant attention sharing, specifically gaze fol- lowing. Most models of infant cognition have been only ab- stractly linked to the detail of a real life environment and to the perception-and-action physicality of human infants. Our simulation uses human data from videotaped infant/caregiver interactions and a rich 3D environment to model the develop- ment of gaze following. Initial tests suggest that infant gaze following can be learned in our simulation using parameters derived from behavioral data.