learning?
At the risk of sounding pompous; I think that you’re talking about a different cause-and-effect. Your neice’s experiments with expressions and gauges their effec by the reactions of the “audience”. I’d guess that this robot is not assessing the impact the expressions have on people, is just comparing the expression to a pre-existing expression “template”.
So the robot has an idea template of what “happy” should look like (for example), and then twitches the face-expression actuators and examines how much more, or less closely the new expression is to the template.Sucessive iterative twitching of more actuators will bring the overall expression closer to the template. They are probably using albert einstien because they already have a lot of archival info on his various expressions, and so it’s easier to get a decent start on the matching.
“learning” in this case is probably not the best word to use - “evolving” facial expressions might be better.