Achievement

IGERT trainee Joshua Lewis collaborated with IGERT faculty Gedeon Deák, IGERT faculty Jochen Triesch (now at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) and Hector Jasso to develop a realistic three dimensional simulation of social infant learning environments. Combined with a reward system based on computer vision techniques and a reinforcement learning model from machine learning, a simulated infant learned to look more frequently in the direction of a simulated caregiver's gaze (a phenomenon known as gaze following). Behavioral data from videotaped interactions between (real) infants and caregivers were used to set simulation parameters, representing a novel end-to-end approach where behavioral data collection, analysis and synthesis, and computational modeling are part of a coherent workflow in one developmental lab. The results from this work will be presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.