Learning in Social Interaction: Perspectives from Psychology and Robotics

Robots are being increasingly deployed in daily life situations. To achieve human-like, authentic interactions with their biological counterparts, endowing robots with learning mechanisms is critical, especially in social contexts. To contribute to this aim, in this paper we introduce cognitive learning mechanisms that are presented in psychology and describe how these theoretical approaches inform current research in robotics. On the one hand, from a psychology perspective, we focus on the learning components of Piaget’s constructivism and Vygotsky’s socio-constructivism. On the other hand, from a robotics perspective, we discuss the implementations and limitations of the applications of these psychological theories in cognitive-developmental and social robotics research. Finally, based on the insights from psychological theories and robotics studies, we propose a conceptual model of a cognitive architecture that hosts components from psychological theories aimed at enabling social robots to learn from biological agents. Thus, a comprehensive goal of the described architecture is to guide social learning processes that can be enhanced in robots that result in their ability to perform complex adaptive behaviors that are observed in their biological counterparts.