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

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.

Roles for Event Representations in Sensorimotor Experience, Memory Formation, and Language Processing.

The unifying theme for the papers in this volume is that event-predictive representations play an important role in cognitive processes, and they are a particularly fruitful object of study for cognitive scientists. In this paper, we present our own model of event representations that draws together several disparate strands of research into event representations, relating to event perception, event encodings in working memory and their role in prediction, and events as they are reported in language. Our main claim is that the notion of deictic routines originally developed by Ballard et al.

What can Neighbourhood Density effects tell us about word learning? Insights from a connectionist model of vocabulary development.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of neighbourhood density (ND) on vocabulary size in a computational model of vocabulary development. A word has a high ND if there are many words phonologically similar to it. High ND words are more easily learned by infants of all abilities (e.

Mapping sensorimotor sequences to word sequences: a connectionist model of language acquisition and sentence generation.

In this article we present a neural network model of sentence generation. The network has both technical and conceptual innovations. Its main technical novelty is in its semantic representations: the messages which form the input to the network are structured as sequences, so that message elements are delivered to the network one at a time.