From Imprinting to Adaptation: Building a History of Affective Interaction

We present a Perception-Action architecture and experiments to simulate imprinting—the establishment of strong attachment links with a "caregiver"—in a robot. Following recent theories, we do not consider imprinting as rigidly timed and irreversible, but as a more flexible phenomenon that allows for further adaptation as a result of reward-based learning through experience. Our architecture reconciles these two types of perceptual learning traditionally considered as different and even incompatible. After the initial imprinting, adaptation is achieved in the context of a history of "affective" interactions between the robot and a human, driven by "distress" and "comfort" responses in the robot.