Tutoring spotter

Experiments on parent-child interaction on object knowledge demonstration and development of “tutoring spotter”

This task focusses on the analysis of features that may help to detect tutoring behaviour, as proposed by Csibra & Gergeley (2006), in parent-child interactions. The data underlying this project is based on 65 parents-child dyads, in which the task for the parents was to demonstrate 10 objects and their functions to their children. The analyses are carried out based on quantitative and qualitative methods using computational tracking systems of human motion developed by Fritsch et al. (2005) as well as speech based analysis tools. The goal is to derive feature sets that are suitable to detect tutoring behaviour in an interaction partner and that can be used to implement a “tutoring spotter”. The project continues on multimodal analysis of the collected data at different levels of granularity in order to find out on which levels the variability occurs. Based on these results further experiments to gather data from parent-infant or tutor-robot interactions may be needed. In order to evaluate the tutoring spotter it will be integrated in an interactive robot system (implemented on iCub) where the effect of the robot’s reaction (i.e. signalling attention) upon the detection of tutoring behaviour on the behaviour of the tutor will be analysed in more detail.

For futher information conntact Dipl-Inform. Katrin Solveig Lohan.