Abstract
Human beings, from the very young age of 18 months, have been shown to be able to extrapolate intentions from actions. That is, upon viewing another human executing a series of actions, the observer can guess the underlying intention, even before the goal has been achieved, and even when the performer failed at achieving the goal. We identify an important preliminary stage in this process, that of determining whether or not an action stream exhibits any intentionality at all. We propose a model of this ability and evaluate it in several experiments.
| Original language | English |
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| Pages | 170-175 |
| Number of pages | 6 |
| State | Published - 2009 |
| Event | 9th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, ICCM 2009 - Duration: 24 Jul 2009 → 26 Jul 2009 |
Conference
| Conference | 9th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling, ICCM 2009 |
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| Period | 24/07/09 → 26/07/09 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© ICCM 2009.All rights reserved.
Funding
Our model also does not deal with the fact that the demonstrations were repeated three times for every child. This information can also be used in determining intentionality (see, for example, Watson (2005) who mentions persistence as a sign of intentionality), as well as for the later stage of determining whether the reached end-state is the intended goal. Future Work Having only just touched the tip of the iceberg regarding the intriguing phenomena of intentionality detection and goal imitation, there is yet much work to be done. In addition to more rigorously testing and evaluating our current model, we intend to broaden it to deal with the notions of persistence and equifinality—information carried by the repetition of every demonstration three times. It would also be interesting to add the possibility of handling varying environmental constraints, such as obstacles, which affect the calculation of the distance measure, as well as treating false beliefs regarding those environmental constraints, and seeing how they affect the conclusion reached regarding intentionality. Acknowledgments. Videos were taken from EC Funded CAVIAR project/IST 2001 37540. This research was partially supported by ISF grant #1357/07. References Blakemore, S. J., & Decety, J. (2001). From the perception of action to the understanding on intention. Nature reviews, neuroscience.
| Funders | Funder number |
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| Israel Science Foundation | 1357/07 |
Keywords
- Cognitive Modeling
- Intention