Looking at the many faces of human socio-cognitive development: 
can it help designing 'social' robots?

Jacqueline Nadel, Unit CNRS La Salpêtrière, Paris
e-mail : jnadel@ext.jussieu.fr


The study of human socio-cognitive development has not a long history. 
However these last twenty years have provided strong evidence that 
newborns and young children show a biased attention to human stimuli as 
compared to physical stimuli. Although we are physical entities defined 
by size, weight, volume, reaction to gravity..., we have specific 
properties such as self-propelled motion, expressiveness, agency, 
intentionality, interactivity that are primary attractors for the very 
young infant seeking for novelty, tracking movement, attracted toward 
novelty and expecting contingency between events. Detection and 
production of social contingency, coupling of perception and action,  
awareness of agency through imitation and recognition of being imitated, 
sharing perceptual or (later) symbolic topics,  are key-features leading 
from basic  to more sophisticated social development.  

Socio-cognitive development cannot be seen as only relying on  the 
development of social information processing. What makes social 
knowledge so exciting is that it is partly not computed, just shared. 
Shared motor representations are important underlying aspects of social 
intelligence. Although they show invariant features, social signals are 
not given once for ever: because they are also felt,  they change their 
meaning according to the context.  Social partners have not assigned 
roles. There is no teacher and no learner,  rather both partners are 
teachers and learners, for  there is no social interaction that does not 
influence each partner, thus changing the meaning and goal of the 
interaction itself. Is it possible to take account of this dynamical 
property of human social interaction when designing “social” robots? 
Would an autonomous robot be able to gain flexibility in the use of and 
response to social signals through experiencing various simple 
interactions with another robot?