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Insights from Developmental Psychology 37

Tronick et al. (1979) as a guide. They identify five phases that characterize social exchanges
between three-month-old infants and their caregivers: initiation, mutual-orientation, greet-
ing, play-dialogue, and disengagement. Each phase represents a collection of behaviors that
mark the state of the communication. Not every phase is present in every interaction. For
example, a greeting does not ensue if mutual orientation is not established. Furthermore, a
sequence of phases may appear multiple times within a given exchange, such as repeated
greetings before the play-dialogue phase begins. This is discussed in depth in chapter 9.
Acquiring a genuine proto-language is beyond the scope of this book, but learning how
to mean and how to communicate those meanings to another (through voice, face, body,
etc.) is a fundamental capacity of a socially intelligent being. These capacities have pro-
foundly motivated the creation of Kismet. Hence, what is conceptualized and implemented
in this work is heavily inspired and motivated by the processes highlighted in this chapter.
I have endeavored to develop a framework that could ultimately be extended to support the
acquisition of a proto-language and this characteristically human social learning process.

3.5 Summary

There are several key insights to be gleaned from the discussion in this chapter. The first
is that human infants are born ready for social interaction with their caregivers. The initial
perceptual and behavioral responses bias an infant to interact with adults and encourage a
caregiver to interact with and care for him. Specifically, many of these responses enable
the caregiver to carry on a “dialogue” with him. Second, the caregiver uses scaffolding
to establish a consistent and appropriately complicated social environment for the infant
that he can predict, steer, and learn from. She allows him to act as if he is in charge of
leading the dialogue, but she is actually the one in charge. By doing so, she allows the
infant to experiment and learn how his responses influence her. Third, the development of
the infant’s acts of meaning is inherently a social process, and it is grounded in having the
infant learn how he can use his voice to serve himself. It is important to consider the infant’s
motivations—why he is motivated to use language and for what reasons. These motivations
drive what he learns and why. These insights have inspired the design of Kismet’s synthetic
nervous system—from the design of each system to the proto-social skills and abilities they
implement. My goal is for people to play with Kismet as they would an infant, thereby
providing those critical interactions that are needed to develop social intelligence and to
become a social actor in the human world.