Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

cognitive science ventures to study humanoid robots that are designed to exploit
social environments and interactions (Breazeal, 2002; Turkle, 2011).
5.11 Robotic Moments in Social Environments
The embodied approach has long recognized that an agent’s environment is much
more that a static array of stimuli (Gibson, 1979; Neisser, 1976; Scribner & Tobach,
1997; Vygotsky, 1986). “The richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment
are provided by other animals and, for us, other people” (Gibson, 1979, p. 135).
A social environment is a rich source of complexity and ranges from dynamic interactions
with other agents to cognitive scaffolding provided by cultural conventions.
“All higher mental processes are primarily social phenomena, made possible by cognitive
tools and characteristic situations that have evolved in the course of history”
(Neisser, 1976, p. 134).
In the most basic sense of social, multiple agents in a shared world produce a
particularly complex source of feedback between each other’s actions. “What the
other animal affords the observer is not only behaviour but also social interaction.
As one moves so does the other, the one sequence of action being suited to the other
in a kind of behavioral loop” (Gibson, 1979, p. 42).
Grey Walter (1963) explored such behavioural loops when he placed two
Tortoises in the same room. Mounted lights provided particularly complex stimuli
in this case, because robot movements would change the position of the two
lights, which in turn altered subsequent robot behaviours. In describing a photographic
record of one such interaction, Grey Walter called the social dynamics of
his machines,
the formation of a cooperative and a competitive society. . . . When the two creatures
are released at the same time in the dark, each is attracted by the other’s
headlight but each in being attracted extinguishes the source of attraction to the
other. The result is a stately circulating movement of minuet-like character; whenever
the creatures touch they become obstacles and withdraw but are attracted
again in rhythmic fashion. (Holland, 2003a, p. 2104)
Similar behavioural loops have been exploited to explain the behaviour of larger collections
of interdependent agents, such as flocks of flying birds or schools of swimming
fish (Nathan & Barbosa, 2008; Reynolds, 1987). Such an aggregate presents
itself as another example of a superorganism, because the synchronized movements
of flock members give “the strong impression of intentional, centralized control”
(Reynolds, 1987, p. 25). However, this impression may be the result of local, stigmergic
interactions in which an environment chiefly consists of other flock members in
an agent’s immediate vicinity.
Elements of Embodied Cognitive Science 245