Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines <s> Prospects in Developmental and Clinical Studies <s> Probabilistic automata are compared with deterministic ones in simulations of growing networks made of dividing interconnected cells. On examples of chains, wheels and tree-like structures made of large numbers of cells it is shown that the number of necessary states in the initial generating cell automaton is reduced drastically when the automaton is probabilistic rather than deterministic. Since the price being paid is a decrease in the accuracy of the generated network, conditions under which reasonable compromises can be achieved are studied. They depend on the degree of redundancy of the final network (defined from the complexity of a deterministic automaton capable of generating it with maximum accuracy), on the "entropy" of the generating probabilistic automaton, and on the effects of different inputs on its transition probabilities (as measured by its "'capacity" in the sense of Shannon's information theory). The results are used to discuss and make more precise the notion of biological specificity. It is suggested that the weak metaphor of a genetic program, classically used to account for the role of DNA in specific genetic determinations, is replaced by that of inputs to biochemical probabilistic automata. <s> BIB001 </s> Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines <s> Prospects in Developmental and Clinical Studies <s> Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery. New data show that infants use computational strategies to detect the statistical and prosodic patterns in language input, and that this leads to the discovery of phonemes and words. Social interaction with another human being affects speech learning in a way that resembles communicative learning in songbirds. The brain's commitment to the statistical and prosodic patterns that are experienced early in life might help to explain the long-standing puzzle of why infants are better language learners than adults. Successful learning by infants, as well as constraints on that learning, are changing theories of language acquisition. <s> BIB002 </s> Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines <s> Prospects in Developmental and Clinical Studies <s> In this paper, we describe an intervention for children with social and communication deficits, such as autism, based on the use of a virtual peer that can engage in tightly collaborative narrative. We present a study in which children with autism engage in collaborative narrative with both a virtual and a human peer, and the use of contingent discourse is compared. Our findings suggest that contingent discourse increased over the course of interaction with a virtual peer, but not a human peer. Furthermore, topic management, such as introducing new topics or maintaining the current topic, was more likely to occur with the virtual peer than with the human peer. We discuss general implications of our work for understanding the role of peer interactions in learning. <s> BIB003 </s> Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines <s> Prospects in Developmental and Clinical Studies <s> Gaze following is a key component of human social cognition. Gaze following directs attention to areas of high information value and accelerates social, causal, and cultural learning. An issue for both robotic and infant learning is whose gaze to follow. The hypothesis tested in this study is that infants use information derived from an entity's interactions with other agents as evidence about whether that entity is a perceiver. A robot was programmed so that it could engage in communicative, imitative exchanges with an adult experimenter. Infants who saw the robot act in this social-communicative fashion were more likely to follow its line of regard than those without such experience. Infants use prior experience with the robot's interactions as evidence that the robot is a psychological agent that can see. Infants want to look at what the robot is seeing, and thus shift their visual attention to the external target. <s> BIB004 </s> Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines <s> Prospects in Developmental and Clinical Studies <s> Most models of conduct disorders are based on a biopsychosocial perspective. In such models, genetic and/or neuropsychological determinants are assumed to have a core hierarchical role by conferring vulnerabilities during a child's development. Based on a review of recent literature, I will show that other views are attempting to integrate the diversity and complexity of factors that influence these behavioural manifestations. The model that best integrates the complexity of these different factors is a developmental model of probabilistic epigenesis. In this paper, I summarise several lines of study that support this model. In addition to the categorical approach of psychiatric nosography, I will adopt a dimensional approach of phenomenology that will help to follow and focus on specific pertinent dimensions such as clinical signs, psychological characteristics, environmental and/or genetic factors in order to study their interactions and their possible developmental outcomes. This model also permits a specific temporal focus on early interactions that many authors consider crucial in terms of developmental cues. <s> BIB005 </s> Interpersonal Synchrony: A Survey of Evaluation Methods across Disciplines <s> Prospects in Developmental and Clinical Studies <s> Abstract We examined peer-reviewed studies in order to understand the current status of empirically based evidence on the clinical applications of robots in the diagnosis and treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Studies are organized into four broad categories: (a) the response of individuals with ASD to robots or robot-like behavior in comparison to human behavior, (b) the use of robots to elicit behaviors, (c) the use of robots to model, teach, and/or practice a skill, and (d) the use of robots to provide feedback on performance. A critical review of the literature revealed that most of the findings are exploratory and have methodological limitations that make it difficult to draw firm conclusions about the clinical utility of robots. Finally, we outline the research needed to determine the incremental validity of this technique. <s> BIB006
In the field of child psychiatry, many potential advantages to using interactive robots in clinical settings with individuals with ASD have been proposed. These advantages include the intrinsic appeal of technology to individuals on the spectrum, the ability of robots to produce simple and isolated social behaviors repetitively, and the fact that they can adapt to provide individualized treatment BIB006 . However, despite media interest, research in this area has been only exploratory, aiming at evaluating preference for machine-like characteristics or using a robot to elicit behaviors, practice a skill, and provide feedback (for a review see BIB006 ). Tartaro et al. proposed to design virtual peers to help children acquire communicative skills BIB003 . They studied the production of contingent discourse of children with ASD in a collaborative task with a virtual peer. The virtual peer was controlled with the Wizard Of Oz methodology and incorporated facilitating features such as yes/no questions or conceptually-simple questions, to elicit responses from the child. They observed that compared to an interaction with a human peer, ASD children produced more contingent responses with the virtual peer. More, over the course of interaction the production of contingent responses increased. However, studies on ASD have not yet considered the key role of social-communicative interaction in mediating interest and infants' gaze following of a robot. In a very elegant study including several conditions, Meltzoff et al. BIB004 reported that 18-month-olds' observation of a social robot interacting with an adult and imitation at a distance changed the infants' interpretations of what the robot was. He was no longer seen as toy with random physical movement but as a psychological agent that could see. At last, communicative development is characterized by mutual influences and coregulations of social signals and affective states between parent and infant during interaction. Thus, probabilistic models and machine learning techniques offer an interesting framework to model such interactive behaviors BIB001 , BIB002 ,  , BIB005 .