In social robotics, robots needs to be able to be understood by humans. Especially in collaborative tasks where they have to share mutual knowledge. For instance, in an educative scenario, learners share their knowledge and they must adapt their behaviour in order to make sure they are understood by others. Learners display behaviours in order to show their understanding and teachers adapt in order to make sure that the learners' knowledge is the required one. This ability requires a model of their own mental states perceived by others: In this paper, we discuss the importance of a cognitive architecture enabling second-order Mutual Modelling for Human-Robot Interaction in educative contexts.
A large amount of fields have introduced frameworks to describe mutual modelling ability @cite_2 . In developmental psychology Flavell @cite_6 denotes two different levels of perspective taking: the (I see, I hear, I want, I like...) and (what other agents feel, hear, want...).
@cite_6 @cite_2
2011348940 2085705051
Abstract In this article we propose an account of the early development of children's knowledge about the mind and report two studies designed to test a part of it. According to this “connections-representations” account, young children begin their discovery of the mental world by learning that they and other people have internal experiences or mental states that connect them cognitively to external objects and events-experiences such as seeing them, hearing them, and wanting them. Later, they realize that the same object can be seriously (other than in pretense) mentally represented in different, seemingly contradictory ways: for example, as A in appearance, B in reality, C according to their perceptual or conceptual perspective, and D according to another person's. The results of both studies confirmed the prediction that 3-year-olds would perform well on appearance-reality and perceptual perspective-taking tasks requiring only an understanding of cognitive connections, but perform poorly on tasks requiring an understanding of seemingly-contrary-to-fact mental representations. To illustrate, children of this age had little difficulty determining that they could hear but could not see a noise-making object located on the experimenter's side of a barrier, and that the experimenter could see it (connections-level tasks). In contrast, they were largely unable to say, for instance, that a toy bear held behind a large elephant mask and emitting a cat sound looked like an elephant, sounded like a cat, and really was a toy bear (representations-level tasks)—even though the experimenter had actually told them previously what it looked like, sounded like, and really was. The article concludes with speculations about the possible origins of connections and representations knowledge and observations about the significance of these acquisitions for the child's development. Mutual modelling, the reciprocal ability to establish a mental model of the other, plays a fundamental role in human interactions. This complex cognitive skill is however difficult to fully apprehend as it encompasses multiple neuronal, psychological and social mechanisms that are generally not easily turned into computational models suitable for robots. This article presents several perspectives on mutual modelling from a range of disciplines, and reflects on how these perspectives can be beneficial to the advancement of social cognition in robotics. We gather here both basic tools (concepts, formalisms, models) and exemplary experimental settings and methods that are of relevance to robotics. This contribution is expected to consolidate the corpus of knowledge readily available to human-robot interaction research, and to foster interest for this fundamentally cross-disciplinary field.