An encounter between 4e cognition and attachment theory

This paper explores a constructive revision of the conceptual underpinnings of Attachment Theory through an encounter with the diverse elements of 4e cognition. Attachment relationships involve the development of preference for one or a few carers and expectations about their availability and responsiveness as a haven of safety and a base from which to explore. In attachment theory, mental representations have been assigned a central organising role in explaining attachment phenomena. The 4e cognition approaches in cognitive science raise a number of questions about the development and interplay of attachment and cognition. These include: (1) the nature of what Bowlby called ‘internal working models of attachment’; (2) the extent to which the infant–carer dyad functions as an extension of the infant's mind; and (3) whether Bowlby's attachment control system concept can be usefully re-framed in enactive terms where traditional cognitivist representations are: (3i) substituted for sensorimotor skill-focused mediating representations; (3ii) viewed as arising from autopoietic living organisms; and/or (3iii) mostly composed from the non-contentful mechanisms of basic minds? A theme that cross-cuts these research questions is how representations for capturing meaning, and structures for adaptive control, are both required to explain the full range of behaviour of interest to Attachment Theory researchers

Strange Carers

The present comment focuses on the distinction between attachment as bond formation and expectations of availability and responsiveness (security) within attachment relationships. We enumerate key components of bonding and functions of carer secure base support. Our analysis has implications for design and suggests that robots are unlikely to serve effectively as sole carers. Even with robots as part-time carers, attachment-like bonds would likely focus on human carers. Similarly, although infants and children would certainly build expectations regarding the availability and responsiveness of robot carers, the quality of human care would probably be the determining influence on later development and competence. Notwithstanding their limitations of robots as attachment figures they have considerable potential to extend parental care and enrich infant exploration. The Sharkey’s paper and further consideration of robots as carers for infants, children, older adults, an

The attachment control system and computational modeling: Origins and prospects

From his first attempts to explain attachment phenomena in the 1940s through his Attachment and Loss trilogy (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980), John Bowlby reformulated the theoretical underpinnings of attachment theory several times. He initially attempted to explain attachment phenomena in psychoanalytic terms. Then he invoked ethological theory in the explanation of how and why people behave as they do in close personal relationships. The mature theoretical framework that he presented between 1969 and 1982 in the attachment and loss trilogy retained strengths and insights, ultimately situating them within an overarching control systems framework. This article describes key stages in Bowlby's theoretical development, with particular emphasis placed on the emergence of control systems theory as a cornerstone of the mature theory. It also compares Bowlby's control systems approach to contemporary cognitive science approaches. It concludes by suggesting how Bowlby's control systems formulation could evolve along the path opened up by contemporary work in computational modeling and how it could benefit by doing so

Sub-Kilowatt Electric Propulsion (SKEP) Project

Poster describing the Sub-Kilowatt Electric Propulsion (SKEP) project to develop a propulsion system (HET (Hall-Effect Thruster), PPU (Power Processing Unit - solar electric propulsion) and XFS (Xenon Feed System)) for ESPA ( Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) Secondary Payload Adapter)-class spacecraft. Technology Goal: SKEP will develop and qualify a long-life, sub-kilowatt integrated propulsion system based on recent advances in Hall-Effect Thruster (HET) technology that will support exploration missions and enable high-value science and commercial applications within the constraints of an ESPA-class spacecraft. Enable double to triple the delta-v propulsive capability currently available to secondary spacecraft, thus making ESPA-class spacecraft compelling for NASA exploration and science missions as well as many commercial applications

Cornerstones and discourses in attachment study: celebrating the publication of a new landmark

Cornerstones in attachment research is a landmark history of five major research groups that have helped establish the empirical foundations of the Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment tradition. This essay highlights Duschinsky’s use of historical methodology rather than the narrative-style review more familiar to psychologists. We then turn to a recurring theme in the book, the inconsistent use of language and theoretical misunderstandings, especially as they arise at the interface between attachment study and more applied disciplines. We discuss Duschinsky’s sociological analysis of how these difficulties arose and are maintained and our own perspective, which emphasizes more difficulties attending communication across declining and emerging paradigms. We expect Cornerstones will be a significant asset as we try to establish new modes of collaboration and communication with educators, clinicians and other practitioners who work not with abstractions and populations but with individuals presenting complex histories and living complex lives

From the Chinese room argument to the church-turing thesis

Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment incorporates a number of assumptions about the role and nature of programs within the computational theory of mind. Two assumptions are analysed in this paper. One is concerned with how interactive we should expect programs to be for a complex cognitive system to be interpreted as having understanding about its environment and its own inner processes. The second is about how self-reflective programs might analyse their own processes. In particular, how self-reflection, and a high level of interactivity with the environment and other intelligent agents in the environment, may give rise to understanding in artificial cognitive systems. A further contribution that this paper makes is to demonstrate that the Church-Turing Thesis does not apply to interactive systems, and to self-reflective systems that incorporate interactivity. This is an important finding because it means that claims about interactive and self-reflective systems need to be considered on a case by case basis rather than using lessons from relatively simple non-interactive and non-reflective computational models to generalise to all computational processes

Is the church turing thesis a red herring for cognitive science?

This paper considers whether computational formalisms beyond the Church Turing Thesis (CTT) could be helpful in understanding the mind. We argue that they may be, and that the way that the CTT has been invoked in Cognitive Science may therefore act as a Red Herring. That is, the way the CTT is invoked in Cognitive Science may mislead and perhaps contribute to premature abandonment of possibly fruitful research directions in Cognitive Science. We do not suggest some sort of “hypercomputation’. Whilst it is possible to use a rich interactive machine to implement a simple function this does not lead to new computable functions. In other words, the CTT is valid even if more sophisticated machinery is employed. It is the other direction that is the core of this paper: When considering more sophisticated computational tasks, then standard Turing machines (and their mode of operation) are not sufficient to explore the range of possibilities. The CTT is commonly interpreted as stating that the intuitive concept of computability is fully captured by Turing machines or any equivalent formalism (such as recursive functions, the lamba calculus, Post production rules, and many others). The CTT implies that if a function is (intuitively) computable, then it can be computed by a Turing machine. Conversely, if a Turing machine cannot compute a function, it is not computable by any mechanism whatsoever. We suggest an inadvertent error that has been made which is the claim that relatively simple computational formalisms like Turing Machines can do anything that more complex computional formalisms can do. To show this we present the landscape of computability within and beyond the bounds covered by the mathematical CTT. This shows that in regions of the computational landscape beyond the CTT there may be hierarchies of increasingly powerful computational formalisms. Erroneously interpreting CTT as enforcing a ‘one size fits all’ interpretation to computational formalisms leads to extreme reductionism that means contemporary computationalism is viewed as inadequate to explaining many phenomena related to thought and mind in living systems. Once this Red Herring interpretation for CTT is avoided this leaves the way open to exploring how richer kinds of computation that may possess many shades of expressivity can form part of Cognitive Science explanations

Developmental trajectories of part-based and configural object recognition in adolescence.

Three experiments assessed the development of children's part and configural (part-relational) processing in object recognition during adolescence. In total, 312 school children aged 7-16 years and 80 adults were tested in 3-alternative forced choice (3-AFC) tasks. They judged the correct appearance of upright and inverted presented familiar animals, artifacts, and newly learned multipart objects, which had been manipulated either in terms of individual parts or part relations. Manipulation of part relations was constrained to either metric (animals, artifacts, and multipart objects) or categorical (multipart objects only) changes. For animals and artifacts, even the youngest children were close to adult levels for the correct recognition of an individual part change. By contrast, it was not until 11-12 years of age that they achieved similar levels of performance with regard to altered metric part relations. For the newly learned multipart objects, performance was equivalent throughout the tested age range for upright presented stimuli in the case of categorical part-specific and part-relational changes. In the case of metric manipulations, the results confirmed the data pattern observed for animals and artifacts. Together, the results provide converging evidence, with studies of face recognition, for a surprisingly late consolidation of configural-metric relative to part-based object recognition

Late development of metric part-relational processing in object recognition

Four experiments with unfamiliar objects examined the remarkably late consolidation of part-relational relative to part-based object recognition (Jüttner, Wakui, Petters, Kaur, & Davidoff, 2013). Our results indicate a particularly protracted developmental trajectory for the processing of metric part relations. Schoolchildren aged 7 to 14 years and adults were tested in 3-Alternative-Forced-Choice tasks to judge the correct appearance of upright and inverted newly learned multipart objects that had been manipulated in terms of individual parts or part relations. Experiment 1 showed that even the youngest tested children were close to adult levels of performance for recognizing categorical changes of individual parts and relative part position. By contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that performance for detecting metric changes of relative part position was distinctly reduced in young children compared with recognizing metric changes of individual parts, and did not approach the latter until 11 to 12 years. A similar developmental dissociation was observed in Experiment 3, which contrasted the detection of metric relative-size changes and metric part changes. Experiment 4 showed that manipulations of metric size that were perceived as part (rather than part-relational) changes eliminated this dissociation. Implications for theories of object recognition and similarities to the development of face perception are discussed

Emotion in the Common Model of Cognition

Emotions play an important role in human cognition and therefore need to be present in the Common Model of Cognition. In this paper, the emotion working group focuses on functional aspects of emotions and describes what we believe are the points of interactions with the Common Model of Cognition. The present paper should not be viewed as a consensus of the group but rather as a first attempt to extract common and divergent aspects of different models of emotions and how they relate to the Common Model of Cognition