Imitation in Animals and Artifacts

by Kerstin Dautenhahn and Chrystopher L. Nehaniv (Eds.)

• ISBN13: 9780262042031
• ISBN10: 0262042037
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-05-21
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

The effort to explain the imitative abilities of humans and other animals draws on fields as diverse as animal behavior, artificial intelligence, computer science, comparative psychology, neuroscience, primatology, and linguistics. This volume represents a first step toward integrating research from those studying imitation in humans and other animals, and those studying imitation through the construction of computer software and robots. Imitation is of particular importance in enabling robotic or software agents to share skills without the intervention of a programmer and in the more general context of interaction and collaboration between software agents and humans. Imitation provides a way for the agent--whether biological or artificial--to establish a "social relationship" and learn about the demonstratorrs"s actions, in order to include them in its own behavioral repertoire. Building robots and software agents that can imitate other artificial or human agents in an appropriate way involves complex problems of perception, experience, context, and action, solved in nature in various ways by animals that imitate.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
The Agent-Based Perspective on Imitation	1	(40)
Kerstin Dautenhahn
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
The Correspondence Problem	41	(22)
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv
Kerstin Dautenhahn
Vocal, Social, and Self-Imitation by Bottlenosed Dolphins	63	(46)
Louis M. Herman
Allospecific Referential Speech Acquisition in Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus): Evidence for Multiple Levels of Avian Vocal Imitation	109	(24)
Irene M. Pepperberg
On Avian Imitation: Cognitive and Ethological Perspectives	133	(24)
Johannes Fritz
Kurt Kotrschal
Art Imitates Life: Programming by Example as an Imitation Game	157	(14)
Henry Lieberman
Learning to Fly	171	(20)
Claude Sammut
Scott Hurst
Dana Kedzier
Donald Michie
Imitation of Sequential and Hierarchical Structure in Action: Experimental Studies with Children and Chimpanzees	191	(20)
Andrew Whiten
Three Sources of Information in Social Learning	211	(18)
Josep Call
Malinda Carpenter
The Mirror System, Imitation, and the Evolution of Language	229	(52)
Michael A. Arbib
Imitation: A Means to Enhance Learning of a Synthetic Protolanguage in Autonomous Robots	281	(30)
Aude Billard
Rethinking the Language Bottleneck: Why Don't Animals Learn to Communicate?	311	(16)
Michael Oliphant
Imitation as a Dual-Route Process Featuring Predictive and Learning Components: A Biologically Plausible Computational Model	327	(36)
John Demiris
Gillian Hayes
Challenges in Building Robots That Imitate People	363	(28)
Cynthia Breazeal
Brian Scassellati
Sensory-Motor Primitives as a Basis for Imitation: Linking Perception to Action and Biology to Robotics	391	(32)
Maja J. Mataric
Imitation or Something Simpler? Modeling Simple Mechanisms for Social Information Processing	423	(18)
Jason Noble
Peter M. Todd
Imitation as a Perceptual Process	441	(30)
Robert W. Mitchell
``Do Monkeys Ape?''-Ten Years After	471	(30)
Elisabetta Visallberghi
Dorothy Fragaszy
Transformational and Associative Theories of Imitation	501	(24)
Cecilia Heyes
Dimensions of Imitative Perception-Action Mediation	525	(30)
Stefan Vogt
Goal Representations in Imitative Actions	555	(18)
Harold Bekkering
Wolfgang Prinz
Information Replication in Culture: Three Modes for the Transmission of Culture Elements through Observed Action	573	(14)
Oliver R. Goodenough
Appendix	587	(2)
Contributors	589	(2)
Index	591