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

Even though an agent’s body can be part of an embodied architecture does not
mean that this architecture is not functional. The key elements of Kismet’s expressive
features are shape and movement; the fact that Kismet is not flesh is irrelevant
because its facial features are defined in terms of their function.
In the robotic moment, what you are made of—silicon, metal, flesh—pales in comparison
with how you behave. In any given circumstance, some people and some
robots are competent and some not. Like people, any particular robot needs to be
judged on its own merits. (Turkle, 2011, p. 94)
That an agent’s body can be part of a functional architecture is an idea that is foreign
to classical cognitive science. It also leads to an architectural complication that
may be unique to embodied cognitive science. Humans have no trouble relating to,
and accepting, sociable robots that are obviously toy creatures, such as Kismet or
the robot dog Aibo (Turkle, 2011). In general, as the appearance and behaviour of
such robots becomes more lifelike, their acceptance will increase.
However, as robots become closer in resemblance to humans, they produce
a reaction called the uncanny valley (MacDorman & Ishiguro, 2006; Mori, 1970).
The uncanny valley is seen in a graph that plots human acceptance of robots as a
function of robot appearance. The uncanny valley is the part of the graph in which
acceptance, which has been steadily growing as appearance grows more lifelike,
suddenly plummets when a robot’s appearance is “almost human”—that is, when it
is realistically human, but can still be differentiated from biological humans.
The uncanny valley is illustrated in the work of roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who,
built androids that reproduced himself, his wife, and his five-year old daughter. The
daughter’s first reaction when she saw her android clone was to flee. She refused to
go near it and would no longer visit her father’s laboratory. (Turkle, 2011, p. 128)
Producing an adequate architectural component—a body that avoids the uncanny
valley—is a distinctive challenge for embodied cognitive scientists who ply their
trade using humanoid robots.
In embodied cognitive science, functional architectures lead to algorithmic
explorations. We saw that when classical cognitive science conducts such explorations,
it uses reverse engineering to attempt to infer the program that an information
processor uses to solve an information processing problem. In classical cognitive
science, algorithmic investigations almost always involve observing behaviour,
often at a fine level of detail. Such behavioural observations are the source of relative
complexity evidence, intermediate state evidence, and error evidence, which
are used to place constraints on inferred algorithms.
Algorithmic investigations in classical cognitive science are almost exclusively
focused on unseen, internal processes. Classical cognitive scientists use behavioural
observations to uncover the algorithms hidden within the “black box” of an agent.
Elements of Embodied Cognitive Science 257