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3 Insights from Developmental Psychology

Human babies become human beings because they are treated as if they already were human beings.
—J. Newson (1979, p. 208)

In this chapter, I discuss the role social interaction plays in learning during infant-caregiver
exchanges. First, I illustrate how the human newborn is primed for social interaction im-
mediately after birth. This fact alone suggests how critically important it is for the infant to
establish a social bond with his caregiver, both for survival purposes as well as to ensure
normal cognitive and social development. Next, I focus on the caregiver and discuss how
she employs various social acts to foster her infant’s development. I discuss how infants
acquire meaningful communication acts through ongoing interaction with adults. I conclude
this chapter by relating these lessons to Kismet’s design.
The design of Kismet’s synthetic nervous system is heavily inspired by the social devel-
opment of human infants. This chapter illustrates strong parallels to the previous chapter in
how social interaction with a benevolent caregiver can foster robot learning. By implement-
ing similar capabilities as the initial perceptual and behavioral repertoire of human infants,
I hope to prime Kismet for natural social exchanges with humans and for socially situated
learning.

3.1 Early Infant-Caregiver Interactions

Immediately after birth, human infants are immersed in a dynamic and social world. A
powerful bond is quickly formed between an infant and the caregiver who plays with him
and nurtures him. Much of what the infant learns is acquired through this social scenario,
in which the caregiver is highly socially sophisticated and culturally competent, whereas
the infant is naive.
From birth, infants demonstrate a preference for humans over other forms of stimuli
(Trevarthen, 1979). Certain types of spontaneous events can momentarily dominate the
infant’s attention (such as primary colors, movement, and sounds), but human-mediated
events are particularly good at sustaining it. Humans certainly encompass a myriad of
attention-getting cues that infants are biologically tuned to react to (coordinated move-
ment, color, and so forth). However, infants demonstrate significant attention to a variety
of human-specific stimuli. For instance, even neonates exhibit a preference for looking at
simple face-like patters (Fantz, 1963). When looking at a face, infants seem particularly
drawn to gazing at the eyes and mouth (Caron et al., 1973). Human speech is also par-
ticularly attractive, and infants show particular preference to the voices of their caregivers
(Mills & Melhuish, 1974; Hauser, 1996). Brazelton (1979) discusses how infants are partic-
ularly attentive to human faces and softly spoken voices. They communicate this preference

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