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166 Socially Intelligent Agentsful autonomous creatures, which show believable animal-like behaviors [5].Successful examples of such intelligent toys are, e.g., the Tamagotchi 1 ,theFurbys 2 and the Sony Aibo [12].For psychologists (starting with Piaget), children’s games are as much aneducational tool as an entertainment device. Similarly, beyond the goal ofmaking a successful toy, ER aims also at developing entertaining educationaltools [8, 11]. An educational toy offers a challenge. It is such that, throughplay, the child explores new strategies and learns new means of using the toy.While this can be true of the simplest toy, such as a wooden stick (which canbe used as a litt, a drill, a bridge), robotics faces the challenge to create a toywhich is sophisticated while leaving sufficient freedom for the child imagination.This is made possible in two ways:1) By making the robot’s behavior (software) adaptable; the user takes partinto the development of its creature (e.g. Tamagotchi, the video gameCreatures [13], the baby dolls My Real Baby 3 and My Dream Baby 4 ;the robot becomes more of a pet.2) By offering flexibility in the design of the robot’s body, e.g. LEGOmindstorms 5 .The Robota dolls have been created in this spirit. They have general learningabilities which allow the user to teach them a verbal and body (movement)language. Because they are dolls, the features of their humanoid body can bechanged by the user (choice of skin color, gender, clothing).1.2 ImitationFollowing Piaget, a number of authors pointed out the frequent co-occurrenceof imitation game during play, suggesting that “the context of play offers aspecial state of mind (relaxed and free from any immediate need) for imitativebehavior to emerge” [15]. Imitation is a powerful means of social learning,which offers a wide variety of interaction. One can imitate gestures, postures,facial expressions, behaviors, where each of the above relates to a differentsocial context. An interesting aspect of imitation in humans (perhaps as opposedto other animals) is that it is a bidirectional process [15]. Humans arecapable to recognize that they are imitated. Imitation becomes also a means ofteaching, where the demonstrator guides the imitator’s reproduction.Roboticists use imitative learning as a user-friendly means to teach a robotcomplex skills, such as learning the best path between two points [4, 6, 9],learning how to manipulate objects [14, 18], and, more generally, learninghow to perform smooth, human-like movements by a humanoid robot [10, 17].These efforts seek to enhance the robot’s ability to interact with humans byproviding it with natural, socially driven behaviors [7].