Attachment and Cognitive Architecture

Humans are interesting combinations of mammalian drives such as feeding, child rearing, and group affiliation, with high level cognitive capabilities such as language and planning. In this position paper, I argue that the attachment behavior system is an interesting boundary case to examine because, while attachment in young children is extremely similar attachment behavior in other primates, it develops alongside high level cognition to quickly incorporate human-specific skills such as language. This makes it hard to fit cleanly into most agent architectures. Most agent architectures are understandably designed on functionalist grounds. That is, starting from some general theory of rational activity, the designer breaks the problem of action into subproblems like sensory-motor control, planning, etc. in whatever manner seems most sensible. These systems tend to break the problem up into a sensory system, a set of sensory-motor primitives, and a relatively general purpose problem-solving system to control them (Bonasso et al. 1997, Arkin 1998). The human system, by contrast, wasn’t designed from scratch. It is the result of the evolution of phylogenetically earlier reptilian and mammalian systems to somehow support the more general problem-solving capabilities of humans. While it is unclear how general-purpose problem solving is implemented in humans, it is clear that most of the mammalian hardware is still present. Many of these systems, such as visual cortex, have clear analogs in AIoriented agent architectures. However, mammals also have a number of special-purpose behavioral systems that don’t fit neatly into a three-level architecture. The attachment behavior system (Bowlby 1969) provides an interesting example of a mammalian system that appears to still be present and active in humans, but which becomes interestingly intertwined with the general purpose system during development. Most interestingly, it is neither clearly superior to, nor subordinate to the general-purpose Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. cognitive system, so it doesn’t fit cleanly into a classical three-level architecture or other tiered architecture.