Wish list of skills

for a symbolically-grounded cognitive robot

Leland McCleary

[Ver. 0.02 – 06 Oct 2008]

This list is a collection of cognitive skills that have been assumed or attested in humans, in this first version based largely on Tomasello (1999). Some of them have been tested for in non-human primates, and some have been set as goals in robot research, with varying results.  It is an open list which may be expanded as further skills are identified.  At the moment the list goes no further than eye gaze and pointing (as incipient symbolization) and does not include the use of other gesture or vocalization.

The list is very roughly in order of ontological appearance, though it is impossible to chronologize  the list for a number of reasons.  First, the categorizations of skills originate in diverse types of research which produce results that are not strictly comparable.  Further, the items are at varying levels of granularity, which means that many of the items may in fact be sub-items of others.  Finally, while certain relations of priority or enablement may appear to hold among some of the items, their appearance may nevertheless appear to occur simultaneously.

An example of how the ordering of the items both does (to some extent) and does not hold is the item “that Self is distinct from Other”.  Gold & Scassellati (2007) have shown that a robot can learn to distinguish Self from animate Other (and from objects) based on internal motor state representations.  While this robot skill does not require an item earlier on the list, “that Self is an intentional being”, it also does not require “that Self can jointly engage with Others”, which supports the latter’s appearing later on the list.

Another example is the skill “that Self and Other can jointly attend”, investigated for robots by Scassellati (1996).  Scassellati, expanding on Baron-Cohen (1995) , concludes that being able to jointly attend can be achieved in four steps, among which are gaze monitoring (“that Self can attend to face, eyes and gaze of Other”), interpolation of gaze (“that Self can discover object of Other’s attention by ‘following’ gaze”) and pointing (“that pointing … can influence knowledge of other by directing attention to some object”).  In the list below, the first two skills precede the target behavior and the third follows, an ordering subject to further refinement of the categories.

What cognitively modern children must know (or learn)

·         …that seeing is knowing

·         …that objects exist in the world

·         …that objects can move (and remain the same objects)

·         …that Self can move and move its parts in controlled ways

·         …that Self can influence objects by moving its parts (can “make things happen”)

·         …that objects can influence (effect) other objects

·         …that Self can jointly engage with objects

·         …that Self can control shift in (choose) focus of attention

·         …that Self can achieve its ‘goals’ by moving its parts

·         …that Self is an intentional being (that its goals are separate from its behavioral means; innate, shared with other primates)

·         …that Self can focus on final goals and mediating goals concurrently

·         …that Self can influence objects as mediating goals to achieve a final goal

·         …that objects are different from Others

·         …that Others are animate beings with powers of self-movement that behave in certain ways, that make things happen

·         …that Self is distinct from Other

·         …that Self can attend to face, eyes and gaze of Other

·         …that Self can jointly engage with Others (dyadic engagement; jointly gazing at each other and interacting)

·         ...that Self can imitate action of Other (dyadic mimicry)

·         …that Others are ‘like me’ (identification: uniquely human, innate capacity?)

·         …that Others are intentional beings (with goals, attention and behavioral  strategy)

·         …that Others’ seeing is Others’ knowing

·         ...that Self can discover object of Other’s attention by ‘following’ gaze

·         …that Self and Other can jointly attend

·         …that Self can influence Other as mediating goal to achieve a final goal

·         …that Self can engage with Other mediated by object (triadic engagement; joint engagement)

·         …that Self can imitate intentional action of Other (imitative learning)

·         …that Self can benefit from intentional affordances of artifacts and attentional strategies of Others

·         …that Self can influence object of Other’s attention by gazing at it (and monitoring Other’s gaze)

·         …that pointing can influence Other by directing attention to object of Self’s goal (Imperative pointing)

·         …that pointing (or showing) can influence knowledge of other by directing attention to some object (Declarative pointing and showing)

References

BARON-COHEN, S.  (1995). Mindblindness. MIT Press.

GOLD, Kevin; SCASSELLATI, Brian. (2007). A Bayesian robot that distinguishes “Self” from “Other”. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci2007). Nashville, Tennessee. Available at: <http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/scaz/papers/Gold-CogSci-07.pdf>.

SCASSELLATI, Brian. (1996). Mechanisms of shared attention for a humanoid robot. AAAI Fall Symposium “Embodied Intelligence.” Cambridge, MA. Oct. 1996. Available at: <http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/scaz/papers/scaz-autism.pdf>.

TOMASELLO, Michael. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Harvard U. Press.