A Cognitive Model for Embodied Gesture Processing in Virtual Agents

Human social interaction encompasses verbal and nonverbal aspects in which hand gesture is a widely used nonverbal communication way. Handling gestures requires different cognitive and knowledge levels, from motor skills to social intentions behind those movements. During social interaction all of these levels can be used for cognitive processes of both perception and generation, as evidenced by neuropsychological studies. In this video, we focus on the motor skills of gestures at different levels of abstraction, from movement trajectories towards higher levels of semantics. In this context, we aim to engage humanoid virtual agents in social interaction with humans. To this end, we developed a cognitive computational model which tries to capture the embodied basis of hand gestures and we demonstrate how it enables to combine and bootstrap the online learning, perception, recognition and generation of gestural movements in a human-agent interaction scenario.

Research website: http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/ags/soa/research/gesture-imitation/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Citec
• Bielefeld
• Amir Sadeghipour
• Stefan Kopp
• University
• cognitive science
• computational model
• gestures
• artificial intelligent
• virtual humanoid agent

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