Ingar Brinck

Developing an understanding of social norms and games : Emotional engagement, nonverbal agreement, and conversation

The first part of the article examines some recent studies on the early development of social norms that examine young children’s understanding of codified rule games. It is argued that the constitutive rules that define the games cannot be identified with social norms and therefore the studies provide limited evidence about socio-normative development. The second part reviews data on children’s play in natural settings that show that children do not understand norms as codified or rules of obligation, and that the norms that guide social interaction are dynamic, situated, and heterogeneous. It is argued that normativity is intersubjective and negotiable and starts to develop in the first year, emerging as a practical skill that depends on participatory engagement. Three sources of compliance are discussed: emotional engagement, nonverbal agreement, and conversation.

REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS

Several conditions for being an intrinsically intentional agent are put forward. On a first level of intentionality the agent has representations. Two kinds are described: cued and detached. An agent with both kinds is able to represent both what is prompted by the context and what is absent from it. An intermediate level of intentionality is achieved by having an inner world, that is, a coherent system of detached representations that model the world. The inner world is used, e.g., for conditional and counterfactual thinking. Contextual or indexical representations are necessary in order that the inner world relates to the actual external world and thus can be used as a basis for action. To have full-blown intentionality, the agent should also have a detached self-awareness, that is, be able to entertain self-representations that are independent of the context.

Nonconceptual content and the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge

A subject may be in a state with nonconceptual content without having the concepts that describe the state. Nonconceptual content does not seem to be a clear-cut case of either implicit or explicit knowledge. It underlies a kind of practical knowledge that is not reducible to procedural knowledge, and is accessible to the subject and under voluntary control.

Interest contagion in violation-of-expectation-based false-belief tasks

In the debate about how to interpret Violation-of-Expectation (VoE) based false-belief experiments, it has been suggested that infants are predicting the actions of the agent based on more or less sophisticated cognitive means. We present an alternative, more parsimonious interpretation, exploring the possibility that the infants’ reactions are not governed by rational expectation but rather of memory strength due to differences in the allocation of cognitive resources earlier in the experiment. Specifically, it is argued that (1) infants’ have a tendency to find more interest in events that observed agents are attending to as opposed to unattended events (“interest contagion”), (2) the object-location configurations that result from such interesting events are remembered more strongly by the infants, and (3) the VoE contrast arises as a consequence of the difference in memory strength between more and less interesting object-location configurations. We discuss two published experiments, one which we argue that our model can explain (Kovács etal., 2010), and one which we argue cannot be readily explained by our model (Onishi and Baillargeon, 2005).

The Gist of Creativity

Creativity is a notoriously evasive concept, and it is used to cover a lot of different phenomena. Different methods and a wide variety of angles have been used in the striving for a clear-cut conception. The focus has been on alternatively the personality of creative people, their childhood, the conditions that a society must fulfil to support a creative atmosphere, works of art contra the discoveries of science, changes in pedagogy to give rise to or improve creativity, computer models, intuition, and so on. Consequently, the resulting picture of creativity varies substantially depending on the goal of the inquiry as well as on the constraints that are set from the start, not only by the scope of the investigation, but also by the discipline that the investigator belongs to and the method that is used.

The Tripod Effect: Co-evolution of Cooperation, Cognition and Communication

This article concerns the co-evolution of hominin cooperation, communication and cognition. Certain hominin ecologies seem to have relied on cognitive foresight. The capacity of planning for future needs, combined with more developed cooperative skills, opened up the cognitive niche of cooperation towards future goals. Such cooperation requires complex intersubjectivity (theory of mind). We analyze five domains of intersubjectivity: emotion, desire, attention, intention, and belief; and argue that cooperation towards future goals requires, among other things, joint intentions (we-intentions). We scrutinize the cognitive and communicative conditions for reciprocal altruism, found in some species; and indirect reciprocity, a form of cooperation typical in the hominin line.

Why metaphysicians do not explain

The paper discusses the concept of explanation in metaphysics. Different types of explanation are identified and explored. Scientific explanation is compared with (alleged) metaphysical explanation. The comparison illustrates the difficulties with applying the concept of explanation in metaphysics.

Evaluation and Testing in Creativity

The cognitive aspects of creativity pertain to modes of thinking and processes of the mind. More thoughts and actions than one at first would think are creative, not only within the fields of science and art, but also in everyday life. Household work like cleaning or cooking sometimes stand in need of creative thinking, as does engaging in science and technology, for instance, by constructing theories to explain observations, or designing new experiments. Only, unless actions are of a historical importance, they rarely receive much attention, not even from the person that stands behind them.

The objects of attention: Causes and targets

The objects of attention can be located anywhere along the causal link from the source of stimuli to the final output of the vision system. As causes, they attract and control attention, and as products, they constitute targets of analysis and explicit comments. Stimulus-driven indexing creates pointers that support fast and frugal cognition.

Making Place for Social Norms in the Design of Human-Robot Interaction

We argue that social robots should be designed to behave similarly to humans, and furthermore that social norms constitute the core of human interaction. Whether robots can be designed to behave in human-like ways turns on whether they can be designed to organize and coordinate their behavior with others’ social expectations. We suggest that social norms regulate interaction in real time, whereagents relies on dynamic information about their own and others’ attention, intention and emotion to perform social tasks.