Attachment and Cognitive Architecture

Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior

Volume

Papers from the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Humans are interesting combinations of mammalian drives such as feeding, child rearing, and group affiliation, with high level cognitive capabilities such as language and planning. In this position paper, I argue that the attachment behavior system is an interesting boundary case to examine because, while attachment in young children is extremely similar attachment behavior in other primates, it develops alongside high level cognition to quickly incorporate human-specific skills such as language. This makes it hard to fit cleanly into most agent architectures.