Synchrony as a tool to establish focus of attention for autonomous robots

With technology and artificial intelligence advancements, the notion of professional service robots has emerged. Consequently, robots must share their physical and social space with human beings. How can robots select a partner among many interactants and how can they focus their attention on regions of interest? As psychologists consider synchrony as an important parameter for social interaction, we hypothesize that in the case of social interaction, people focus their attention on regions of interest where the visual stimuli are synchronized with their inner dynamics. Then, we assume that a mechanism able to detect synchrony between internal dynamics of a robot and external visual stimuli (optical flow) can be used as a starting point for human robot interaction. This kind of mechanism can also be involved in more complex tasks of interaction such as partner selection. Inspired by human psychological and neurobiological data, we propose a synchrony-based neural network architecture capable of selecting the robot partner and of locating focus of attention.