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Poster
in
Workshop: Workshop on Theory of Mind in Communicating Agents

The SocialAI School: Insights from Developmental Psychology Towards Artificial Socio-Cultural Agents

Grgur Kovač · Rémy Portelas · Peter F Dominey · Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Keywords: [ social cognition ] [ bruner ] [ tomasello ] [ developmental psychology ] [ Reinforcement Learning ]


Abstract:

Developmental psychologists have long-established the importance socio-cognitive abilities in human intelligence. These abilities enable us to enter, participate and benefit from human culture. AI research on social interactive agents mostly concerns the emergence of culture in a multi-agent setting (often without a strong grounding in developmental psychology). We argue that AI research should be informed by psychology and study socio-cognitive abilities enabling to enter a culture too. We discuss the theories of Michael Tomasello and Jerome Bruner to introduce some of their concepts to AI and outline key concepts and socio-cognitive abilities. We present The SocialAI school - a tool including a customizable parameterized suite of procedurally generated environments, which simplifies conducting experiments regarding those concepts. We show examples of such experiments with RL agents and pure-text Language Models. The main motivation of this work is to engage the AI community around the problem of social intelligence informed by developmental psychology, and to provide a tool to simplify first steps in this direction.

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