Demiris Yiannis, Meltzoff Andrew
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK.
Infant Child Dev. 2008 Jan;17(1):43-53. doi: 10.1002/icd.543.
Interesting systems, whether biological or artificial, develop. Starting from some initial conditions, they respond to environmental changes, and continuously improve their capabilities. Developmental psychologists have dedicated significant effort to studying the developmental progression of infant imitation skills, because imitation underlies the infant's ability to understand and learn from his or her social environment. In a converging intellectual endeavour, roboticists have been equipping robots with the ability to observe and imitate human actions because such abilities can lead to rapid teaching of robots to perform tasks. We provide here a comparative analysis between studies of infants imitating and learning from human demonstrators, and computational experiments aimed at equipping a robot with such abilities. We will compare the research across the following two dimensions: (a) initial conditions-what is innate in infants, and what functionality is initially given to robots, and (b) developmental mechanisms-how does the performance of infants improve over time, and what mechanisms are given to robots to achieve equivalent behaviour. Both developmental science and robotics are critically concerned with: (a) how their systems can and do go 'beyond the stimulus' given during the demonstration, and (b) how the internal models used in this process are acquired during the lifetime of the system.
有趣的系统，无论是生物系统还是人工系统，都会不断发展。从一些初始条件出发，它们会对环境变化做出反应，并持续提升自身能力。发展心理学家投入了大量精力来研究婴儿模仿技能的发展进程，因为模仿是婴儿理解并从其社会环境中学习的能力基础。在一项相互关联的智力探索中，机器人专家一直致力于赋予机器人观察和模仿人类动作的能力，因为这些能力能使机器人快速学会执行任务。我们在此对婴儿模仿人类示范者并从中学习的研究与旨在赋予机器人这些能力的计算实验进行比较分析。我们将在以下两个维度上比较相关研究：（a）初始条件——婴儿天生具备什么，以及最初赋予机器人什么功能；（b）发展机制——婴儿的表现如何随时间提升，以及赋予机器人何种机制以实现等效行为。发展科学和机器人技术都极为关注：（a）它们的系统如何以及是否能够“超越示范过程中给出的刺激”；（b）在这个过程中使用的内部模型是如何在系统的生命周期内习得的。
