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Emergent mirror systems for body language

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Abstract

This chapter investigates how a vocabulary for talking about body actions can emerge in a population of grounded autonomous agents instantiated as humanoid robots. The agents play a Posture Game in which the speaker asks the hearer to take on a certain posture. The speaker either signals success if the hearer indeed performs an action to achieve the posture or he shows the posture himself so that the hearer can acquire the name. The challenge of emergent body language raises not only fundamental issues in how a perceptually grounded lexicon can arise in a population of autonomous agents but also more general questions of human cognition, in particular how agents can develop a body model and a mirror system so that they can recognize actions of others as being the same as their own.

Abstract

This chapter investigates how a vocabulary for talking about body actions can emerge in a population of grounded autonomous agents instantiated as humanoid robots. The agents play a Posture Game in which the speaker asks the hearer to take on a certain posture. The speaker either signals success if the hearer indeed performs an action to achieve the posture or he shows the posture himself so that the hearer can acquire the name. The challenge of emergent body language raises not only fundamental issues in how a perceptually grounded lexicon can arise in a population of autonomous agents but also more general questions of human cognition, in particular how agents can develop a body model and a mirror system so that they can recognize actions of others as being the same as their own.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword vii
  4. Introduction. Self-organization and selection in cultural language evolution 1
  5. Part I. Emergence of perceptually grounded vocabularies
  6. The Grounded Naming Game 41
  7. Language strategies for color 61
  8. Emergent mirror systems for body language 87
  9. The co-evolution of basic spatial terms and categories 111
  10. Multi-dimensional meanings in lexicon formation 143
  11. Part II. Emergence of grammatical systems
  12. The evolution of case systems for marking event structure 169
  13. Emergent functional grammar for space 207
  14. The emergence of internal agreement systems 233
  15. A language strategy for aspect 257
  16. The emergence of quantifiers 277
  17. Index 305
Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution
This chapter is in the book Experiments in Cultural Language Evolution
https://doi.org/10.1075/ais.3.06ste

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword vii
  4. Introduction. Self-organization and selection in cultural language evolution 1
  5. Part I. Emergence of perceptually grounded vocabularies
  6. The Grounded Naming Game 41
  7. Language strategies for color 61
  8. Emergent mirror systems for body language 87
  9. The co-evolution of basic spatial terms and categories 111
  10. Multi-dimensional meanings in lexicon formation 143
  11. Part II. Emergence of grammatical systems
  12. The evolution of case systems for marking event structure 169
  13. Emergent functional grammar for space 207
  14. The emergence of internal agreement systems 233
  15. A language strategy for aspect 257
  16. The emergence of quantifiers 277
  17. Index 305
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