Studying Embodied Cognition in the Android Alter

In this study, we report the investigations conducted on the mimetic behavior of a new humanoid robot called Alter3. Alter3 autonomously imitates the motions of a human in front of him and stores the motion sequences in its memory. Alter3 also contains a self-simulator that simulates its own motions before executing them and generates a self-image. We investigate how this mimetic behavior evolves with human interaction, by analyzing memory dynamics and information flow between Alter3 and humans. One important observation from this study is that when Alter3 fails to imitate human motion, humans tend to imitate Alter3 instead. This tendency is quantified by the alternation of the direction of information flow. At the conference we will also report on the experiments we carried out recently, in which two Alters imitated each other, and in which we let people possess and imitate Alter.