The researchers believe this is the first time robotics, developmental psychology, and computer science have been combined in a study like this.
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Writing in the recent issue of the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers also found that much like successful comedians who go for the big laugh, babies have a great sense of timing that helps get adults to smile back, without having to smile too much themselves. Their analysis found that 11 out of the 13 babies in the study showed clear signs of intentional smiling. Their babies, on the other hand, most often smiled only as a means of getting their mothers to do the same. The research gathered data on how often mother and baby smiled at each other and exactly when they smiled.
“If you have ever interacted with babies, you suspect they are up to something when they are smiling”. The study is part of an effort funded by the National Science Foundation to use robots to better understand human development. The robot was programmed the act like a baby, and was then presented to undergraduate students.
Researchers Paul Ruvolo, Daniel Messinger, and Javier Movellan needed a control to compare with the normal interactions of mothers and their children, so they decided to get a hyperreal robo-baby named Diego-San.
“We are not claiming that a particular cognitive mechanism, for instance conscious deliberation, is responsible for the observed behaviors”. This methodology helps scientists design and program robots to perform a behavior based on specific goals. Diego San interacted with 32 UC San Diego undergraduates individually during three-minute sessions where it displayed one of four different behaviors. Consider the fact that researchers programmed a very realistic-looking child-like robot to smile at adults.
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Author Dan Messinger, from the University of Miami, said: “What makes our study unique is that previous approaches to studying infant-parent interaction essentially describe patterns”. What are they trying to communicate to us? Researchers carefully observed the interaction between the mother and the infant and determined four goals the mother-infant pair tries to achieve: maximizing the time of simultaneous smiling, maximizing mother smiling, maximizing infant smiling, and nobody smiling.
