Learning Gaze Direction Perception - An Investigation by Behavioral and Neurocomputational Approaches

Abstract

The gaze direction perception is an important component of human social cognition, but the ontogenesis of this perceptual ability is not well known. The present study attempted to investigate the ontogenesis of the well-documented characteristics of the human gaze direction perception that the head orientation information influences the perceived gaze direction. The results showed that a simple connectionist model of the human visual system could simulate several important aspects of human performance after trained by the supervised-learning, indicating that the postnatal perceptual-learning plays some roles in the development of the gaze direction perception.

Primate Social Cognition: Uniquely Primate, Uniquely Social, or Just Unique?

“…Our view is that, although explanations based on learning theory often provide valuable critical correction, and connectionist models of cognitive processes (in some ways the modern equivalent of the networks of unlabelled associations in behaviourist learning theory) have achieved notable successes in specific areas (e.g. Doi et al, 2009;Mayor and Plunkett, 2010), cognitive and neurocomputational explanations are not mutually exclusive, but instead provide different levels of explanation, each with different utility (Byrne and Bates, 2006). In any case, we consider it unlikely that disputes about the right approach to understanding the nature of cognition will be settled by logic and decisive argument (Garzon and Rodriguez, 2009): which approach will prove more productive over time is an empirical question.…”