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160 Socially Intelligent Agentswith the interlocutor, the robot has to be an intentional being capable of goaldirectedspontaneous behavior by itself; otherwise, the empathetic process willnot work.• •anotherfeelactself(act)• •(feel)environmentFigure 19.2.Empathy for another person’s behavior.In order to acquire intentionality, a robot should possess the following: (1)a sensori-motor system, with which the robot can utilize the affordance in theenvironment; (2) a repertoire of behaviors, whose initial contents are innatereflexes, e.g., grasping whatever the hand touches; (3) a value system thatevaluates what the robot feels exteroceptively and proprioceptively; and (4)a learning mechanism that reinforces (positively or negatively) a behavior accordingto the value (e.g., pleasure and displeasure) of the result. Beginningwith innate reflexes, which consist of a continuous spectrum of sensori-motormodalities, the robot explores the gamut of effective (profitable) cause-effectassociations through its interaction with the environment. The robot is graduallyable to use these associations spontaneously as method-goal associations.We have defined this as the acquisition of intentionality.4. Being identicalTo understand others’ intentions, the intentional robot has to identify itselfwith others. This requires it to observe how others feel and act, as shown inFigure 19.2. Joint attention plays an important role in this understanding [1, 9],and action capture is also indispensable. Joint attention enables the robot toobserve what others exteroceptively perceive from the environment, and actioncapture translates the observed action of others into its own motor program sothat it can produce the same action or proprioception that is attached to thataction.4.1 Joint attentionJoint attention is the act of sharing each other’s attentional focus. 1 It spotlightsthe objects and events being attended to by the participants of communication,thus creating a shared context in front of them. The shared context is a