Page 49 - Designing Sociable Robots

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30 Chapter 3

3.2 Development of Communication and Meaning

It is essential for the infant’s psychological development that her caregiver treat her as an
intentional being. Both the infant’s responses and her parent’s own caregiving responses
have been selected for because they foster this kind of interaction. This, in turn, serves
to bootstrap the infant into a cultural world. Trevarthen (1979) argues that infants must
exhibit subjectivity (i.e., the ability to clearly demonstrate to others by means of coordinated
actions at least the rudiments of intentional behavior) to be able to engage in interpersonal
communication. According to Newson (1979), the early proto-social responses exhibited
by infants are a close enough approximation to the adult forms that the caregiver interprets
his infant’s reactions by a process of adultomorphism. Simply stated, he treats his infant
as if she is already fully socially aware and responsive—with thoughts, wishes, intents,
desires, and feelings that she is trying to communicate to him as any other person would.
He credits his infant’s actions (which may be spontaneous, reflexive, or accidental) with
social significance and treats them as her attempt to carry out a meaningful dialogue with
him. This allows him to impute meaning to the exchange in a consistent and reliable manner
and to establish a dialogue with her. It is from these exchanges that the communication of
shared meanings gradually begins to take form.
By six weeks, human infants and their caregivers are communicating extensively face-to-
face. During nurturing or playful exchanges, the baby’s actions include vocalizing, crying,
displaying facial expressions, waving, kicking, satisfied sucking or snuggling, and so on,
which the caregiver interprets as her attempts to communicate her thoughts, feelings, and
intentions to him. At an infant’s early age, Kaye (1979) and Newson (1979) point out that
it is the caregiver who supplies the meaning to the exchange, and it is the proto-social skill
of early turn-taking that allows him to maintain the illusion that a meaningful conversation
is taking place. When his infant does something that can be interpreted as a turn in the
proto-dialogue, he treats it as such. He fills the gaps with her responses and pauses to allow
her to respond, while allowing himself to be paced by her but also gently encouraging her.
The pragmatics of conversation are established during these proto-dialogues which in
turn plays an important role in how meaning emerges for the infant. Schaffer (1977) writes
that turn-taking of the “non-specific, flexible, human variety” prepares the infant for several
important social developments. First, it allows the infant to discover what sorts of activity
on her part will get responses from her caregiver. Second, it allows routine, predictable
sequences to be established that provide a context of mutual expectations. This is possible
due to the caregiver’s consistent and predictable manner of responding to his infant because
he assumes that she is fully socially responsive and shares the same meanings that he applies
to the interaction. Eventually, the infant exploits these consistencies to learn the significance
her actions and expressions have for other people—to the point where she does share the
same meanings.