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. 2022 Jul 18;53(1):148-168.
doi: 10.1080/03036758.2022.2098781. eCollection 2023.

Deconstructing and reconstructing turn-taking in caregiver-infant interactions: a platform for embodied models of early cooperation

Mark Sagar  1   2 , Annette M E Henderson  3 , Martin Takac  1   4 , Samara Morrison  1   3   2 , Alistair Knott  1   5 , Alecia Moser  2   3 , Wan-Ting Yeh  3 , Nathan Pages  1 , Khurram Jawed  1
Affiliations

Deconstructing and reconstructing turn-taking in caregiver-infant interactions: a platform for embodied models of early cooperation

Mark Sagar et al. J R Soc N Z. .

Abstract

Despite recent advances in AI, building systems that can engage in natural and realistic cooperative interactions with human partners remains a challenge. In this article, we argue that as a precursor to modelling sophisticated cooperation in adults, it's useful to build a model of how cooperation develops in infants. We present a simple initial model of infant cooperation, embodied in BabyX - a hyperrealistic virtual simulation of an 18-month-old infant that can interact with human partners in real time. Our focus in this paper is on cooperative behaviours in the nonverbal domain. The framework for our model of these behaviours is a cognitive model of events and event processing. We detail how cognitive and motor mechanisms in BabyX lead to rudimentary cooperation manifested in nonverbal turn-taking. We introduce a novel empirical paradigm for testing BabyX's model of cooperation, by comparing her interactions with users with 'real' interactions between human infants and their caregivers, which we observed in a detailed empirical study. In this study, we find nonverbal turn-taking in human infant-caregiver interactions, consistent with our BabyX model. This initial model provides the foundation for a comprehensive, and developmentally consistent, model of human cooperation.

Keywords: Turn-taking; artificial intelligence; caregiver-infant interactions; cooperation; embodied models; infancy; social games.

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Conflict of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Left: BabyX, interacting with a touchscreen in her virtual environment. Right: a human infant in our caregiver-infant interaction experiment, interacting with a real touchscreen.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Left: BabyX’s view of the touchscreen, with the user in the background. Right: the user’s view of the touchscreen, with BabyX in the background.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Experimental setup for touchscreen-mediated infant and caregiver interactions.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Proportion of caregivers’ total number of discrete actions that the infant interrupted as a function of the infant age for the total task.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Mean duration of infant interruptions (as a proportion of caregivers’ action) as a function of the infant age for S-A and S-B.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Proportion of infants’ actions that resulted in ceding the floor as a function of whether the action was interrupted or uninterrupted.
Figure 7.
Figure 7.
Mean latency of infants’ ceding the floor following an interruption as a function of age for S-A and S-B.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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