AI, Attachment Theory and
Simulating Secure Base
Behaviour: Dr. Bowlby meet the
Reverend Bayes.
Dean Petters and Everett Waters
Overview
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Behavioural component of Attachment Theory
Cognitive Component of Attachment Theory
Agent Based Modelling
Future prospects
– Overlaying Bowlby’s systems with a contemporary view of interacting
action controllers
– Interactions between subsystems – Bayesian mediation
– Lower level components ‘shaping’ higher level components
– Growing subsystems from the bottom-up as an example of cascaded
development
• Next Steps
– Richer, deeper scenarios
Motivation
• Attachment Theory Inspired AI
– How to constrain a cognitive/affective architecture
– Attachment as an example of a high level interrupt to processing
– Sloman, Minsky, Simon (1967), etc
• AI Inspired Attachment Theory
– Nature of representation - Bowlby, Ainsworth, Sroufe and Waters
(1977) – from proximity to felt security
– Can focussing on architectures for attachment help unify/organise
disparate empirical measures?
– How is the attachment control system formed over development?
Behavioural Component of
Attachment Theory
• Hospitalisation; maternal deprivation, bereavement (Bowlby 1944
onwards)
• Naturalistic study of exploration in a park (Anderson 1972)
• Ganda study (Ainsworth 1967)
• The Strange Situation Procedure (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters
and Wall, 1978)
• Attachment Q sort (Waters and Deane (1985)
• Measures in later childhood; adolescence; adult romantic
relationships; Adult Attachment Interview
• Secure-base scripts in adults (Waters and Waters 2006)
Strange Situation Procedure
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Year long home observation
At 1 year 24 minute structured observation
8 x 3 minute changes in status
Compare home and laboratory – 3 clusters of response
found
• Secure - Type B
• Insecure
– Avoidant - Type A
– Ambivalent/resistant – Type C
– Disorganised - Type D
• Reunion not separation is key – how does infant
represent carer as secure base
• Longitudinal correlations with AAI
Cognitive Component of Attachment
Theory
• From ethological ‘behaviours’ to cybernetics, control
systems, and hierarchical plans
• Instincts that have to be constructed; expectable
environments
• Flexible repertoire direct by outcomes
• Hierarchy of forms of information processing
• Constructed and reconstructed through
development
Hierarchy of forms of information
processing
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Reflexes
Fixed action patterns
Goal directed mechanisms
Internal Working Models
Hierarchical plans
Natural Language
• Ontogeny of this architecture; trajectories for
individual differences?
Agent based
simulations
• Bischof (1977)
• Petters (2004,
2006)
Simulations with
reactive agents
demonstrating
clustering of
secure and in secure
subgroups
A hybrid
architecture
• Petters (2006)
• Note information flow
between reactive and
deliberative
subsystems
• Is this really how
subsystems
communicate/coordina
te?
Comparing Bowlby’s architecture to
contemporary control systems
• Reflexes
• Fixed action
patterns
• Goal directed
mechanisms
• Internal
Working Models
• Hierarchical
plans
• Natural
Language
• Pavlovian controller
•Fast, no learning, routine, outside of
concsiousness, evolved, not part of Bayesian
arbitration
• Habitual controller
•Learnt, cached single value, not open to
reflection, not changeable in one shot,
computationally easy, statistically hard, shaping
from Pavlovian,
• Episodic controller
• Model-based controller
•Learnt, plans, alternative choices, uses all
available info, computationally intractable,
statistics available, open to incorporate new info
in the fly
(Dayan 2009, and other papers)
How might the attachment control
system be constructed?
• Chappell and Sloman (2007) – cascaded developmental
process where acquisition of associations between
action and goal is delayed
• Bowlby - Pecking and sucking occur first in chicks or
puppies independently of hunger, and the causal
properties of these actions are subsequently matched
to goal of hunger reduction
• Do infants come to ‘understand’ the causal role of
calling for or crawling to their carers only after
production of proximity gaining behaviours that are
merely reflexes or fixed action patterns? Building up
models of our attachment relationships
Conclusion and next steps
• Inspiration from contemporary AI:
– To refine the description of the attachment control architecture
– To add Bayesian arbitration, linking control to prediction
– New sophistication in interrelations of different subsystems through
ontogeny, e.g. ‘shaping’
– To move from measurement of behavioural phenomena to theories of
construction of architectures underlying phenomena through
ontogeny
• New scenarios
- beyond turtle-like or vehicle-like cycles of attraction and aversion
- mother provides affordances in the process of "co-construction" or
"scaffolding“
- “There is no such thing as a baby, only a baby and a mother” Winnicott (1965)