  Performing joint interaction requires constant mutual monitoring of own
actions and their effects on the other's behaviour. Such an action-effect
monitoring is boosted by social cues and might result in an increasing sense of
agency. Joint actions and joint attention are strictly correlated and both of
them contribute to the formation of a precise temporal coordination. In
human-robot interaction, the robot's ability to establish joint attention with
a human partner and exploit various social cues to react accordingly is a
crucial step in creating communicative robots. Along the social component, an
effective human-robot interaction can be seen as a new method to improve and
make the robot's learning process more natural and robust for a given task. In
this work we use different social skills, such as mutual gaze, gaze following,
speech and human face recognition, to develop an effective teacher-learner
scenario tailored to visual object learning in dynamic environments.
Experiments on the iCub robot demonstrate that the system allows the robot to
learn new objects through a natural interaction with a human teacher in
presence of distractors.
