Studying Robot Social Cognition Within A Developmental Psychology Framework

This paper discusses two prominent theories of cog-nitive development and relates them to experiments in social robotics. The main diierence between these theories lies in the diierent views on the relationship between a child and its social environment: a) the child as a solitary thinker (Piaget) and b) the child in society (Vygotsky). We discuss the implications this has on the design of socially intelligent agents, focusing on robotic agents. We argue that the framework proposed by Vygotsky provides a promising research direction in autonomous agents. We give examples of implementations in the area of social robotics which support our theoretical considerations. More speciically, we demonstrate how a teacher-learner setup can be used to teach a robot a proto-language. The same control architecture is also used for a humanoid doll robot which can interact with a human by imitation. Another experiment addresses dynamic coupling of movements between a human and a mobile robot. Here, emergent robot-human interaction dynamics are innuenced by the temporal coordination between the robot's and the human's movements.