Autonomous development of turn-taking behaviors in agent populations: A computational study

We provide a computational model showing how turn-taking behaviors can self-organize out of sensorimotor interactions between vocalizing agents. Recent hypotheses propose that turn-taking behaviors in certain primate species emerge from a need to maintain vocal contact in a group (e.g. in dense environments preventing visual contact). In this context, vocalizations can convey information about the presence of each group member and taking turns allow to minimize the vocal signal interferences. We consider agents equipped with a cognitive architecture based on two coupled control loops: a reactive one implementing a basic regulatory behavior to maintain vocal listening and an adaptive one learning an action policy to maximize vocal contact among group members. We show that the reactive process bootstraps the adaptive learning to converge toward a collective turn-taking strategy. This model provides a computational support to the hypothesis that turn-taking can emerge from functional constraints related to group cohesion and inter-individual vocal signal interferences. We suggest future directions of research to understand how social behaviors can result from sensorimotor interactions.