Page 51 - Designing Sociable Robots

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32 Chapter 3

dominant). The maestro continually makes adjustments to add variety and richness to the
interplay, while allowing the pupil to participate in, experience, and learn from a higher level
of performance than the pupil could accomplish on his own. Indeed, the caregiver’s role is
targeted toward developing the social sophistication of her infant to approach her own.
As traditionally viewed by the field of developmental psychology, scaffolding is concep-
tualized as a supportive structure provided by an adult whereby the adult manipulates the
infant’s interactions with the environment to foster novel abilities (Wood et al., 1976). Com-
monly viewed in social terms, it involves reducing distractions, marking the task’s critical
attributes, giving the infant affective forms of feedback, reducing the number of degrees of
freedom in the target task, enabling the infant to experience the desired outcome before he
is cognitively or physically able of seeking and attaining it for himself, and so forth. For
instance, by exploiting the infant’s instinct to perform a walking motion when supported
upright, parents encourage their infant to learn how to walk before he is physically able. In
this view, scaffolding is used as a pedagogical device where the adult provides deliberate
support and guidance to push the infant a little beyond his current abilities to enable him to
learn new skills.
Another notion of scaffolding stresses the importance of proto-social responses and
their ability to bootstrap infants into social interactions with their caregivers. This form
of scaffolding is referred to as emergent scaffolding by Hendriks-Jansen (1996). Here the
caregiver-infant dyad is seen as two tightly coupled dynamic systems. In contrast to the
previous case where the adult deliberately guides the infant’s behavior to a desired outcome,
instead the interaction is more free-form and arises from the continuous mutual adjustments
between the two participants. For instance, the interaction between a suckling infant and
the caregiver who jiggles him whenever he pauses in feeding creates a recognizable pattern
of interaction. This interaction pattern encourages the habit of turn-taking, the importance
of which was discussed earlier. Many of these early action patterns that newborns exhibit
(such as this burst-pause-burst suckling pattern) have no place in adult behavior. They
simply serve a bootstrapping role to launch the infant into the socio-cultural environment
of adults, where important skills can then be transferred from adult to child.
Looking within the infant, there is a third form of scaffolding. For the purposes here,
I call it internal scaffolding. This internal aspect refers to the incremental construction of
the cognitive structures themselves that underlie observable behavior. Here, the form of
the more mature cognitive structures are bootstrapped from earlier forms. Because these
earlier forms provide the infant with some level of competence in the world, they are a good
starting point for the later competencies to improve upon. In this way, the earlier structures
foster and facilitate the learning of more sophisticated capabilities.
Hence, the infant is socially and culturally naive as compared to his caregiver. However,
he is born with a rich set of well-coordinated proto-social responses that elicit nurturing,