Paper Info
Title
How do children learn to follow gaze, share joint attention, imitate their teachers, and use tools during social interactions?
Abstract
How does an infant learn through visual experience to imitate actions of adult teachers, despite the fact that the infant and adult view one another and the world from different perspectives? To accomplish this, an infant needs to learn how to share joint attention with adult teachers and to follow their gaze towards valued goal objects. The infant also needs to be capable of view-invariant object learning and recognition whereby it can carry out goal-directed behaviors, such as the use of tools, using different object views than the ones that its teachers use. Such capabilities are often attributed to “mirror neurons”. This attribution does not, however, explain the brain processes whereby these competences arise. This article describes the CRIB (Circular Reactions for Imitative Behavior) neural model of how the brain achieves these goals through inter-personal circular reactions. Inter-personal circular reactions generalize the intra-personal circular reactions of Piaget, which clarify how infants learn from their own babbled arm movements and reactive eye movements how to carry out volitional reaches, with or without tools, towards valued goal objects. The article proposes how intra-personal circular reactions create a foundation for inter-personal circular reactions when infants and other learners interact with external teachers in space. Both types of circular reactions involve learned coordinate transformations between body-centered arm movement commands and retinotopic visual feedback, and coordination of processes within and between the What and Where cortical processing streams. Specific breakdowns of model processes generate formal symptoms similar to clinical symptoms of autism.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1016/j.neunet.2010.07.011
Neural Networks
Keywords
Field
DocType
Infant development,Imitation learning,Circular reaction,Spatial attention,Object recognition,Joint attention,Gaze,Arm movement,Tool use,Mirror neurons,Theory of mind,Autism,CRIB
Social relation,Gaze,Mirror neuron,Joint attention,Theory of mind,Cognitive psychology,Eye movement,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning,Mathematics,Visual perception,Form perception
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
23
8
0893-6080
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.42
22
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stephen Grossberg159002041.71
Tony Vladusich251.83