Epistemic Actions in Attachment Relationships and the Origin of the Socially Extended Mind

Attachment Theory describes how humans possess a strong innate predisposition to emotionally attach to familiar people around them who provide physical or emotional security. When infants learn to trust in intimate and enduring relationships they will tend to use their carers to extend their minds. Such cognitive extension is likely to impact mental health by helping infants reach the upper limit of their cognitive performance. Conversely, a caregiver’s failure to gain ‘epistemic trust’ may act as a contributory risk factor for multiple later psychopathologies 1 ATTACHMENT RELATIONSHIPS AND THE EXTENDED MIND HYPOTHESIS The extended mind thesis in cognitive science suggests that entities in the external environment may interact with internal mental processes in such a way that these entities can be seen as extensions of the mind itself [4, 5]. Cognitive extension is usually cast in terms of extending the mind onto inorganic objects in the environment, such as a mathematician doing their ‘working’ on paper. However, extension onto external agents (such as caregivers, teachers, friends or work colleagues) is not ruled out in this approach. For cognitive extension to involve extension of mental states onto an agent rather than an inorganic object, the agent must be strongly trusted, relied upon and accessible as an information provider [5]. There are many adult occupations where intense social interaction and information transfer occurs between workers jointly undertaking complex information critical tasks. When trust is built up over time or through training in surgical teams, between police partners, or in small military groups, then individuals may use other people to extend their own cognition. However, such adult work related examples of social extension of cognition are not the focus of this paper. Instead this paper will concentrate on considering how examples of social extended cognition may occur when caregivers provide external cognitive support to infants and children (whilst also considering attachment partnerships between caregivers and adolescents and between adult romantic partners). The idea that infants, older children and even adult attachment partners all look to their carers as information sources about the broader world is a familiar one. For example, social referencing and joint attention are both well studied topics in developmental psychology [3]. From the perspective of the socially extended mind, infant social referencing and joint attention between infant and carer may be seen as physical actions that make the infant’s mental computations faster, more reliable or less effortful by actually incorporating the carer’s help within those cognitive operations. Socially extended 1 University of Birmingham, UK, email: d.d. petters@cs.bham. ac.uk 2 SUNY, Stony Brook, USA. cognition in infant-carer dyads are likely to be asymmetric with caregivers providing the extra support and the infant’s cognition being extended. So, if a carer (as part of the environment) is coupled to an infant’s cognitive system in the right way, they become part of the infant’s mind. This approach is therefore treating the infant cognition as occurring ‘outside’ and well as ‘inside the head’. How well can the affordances provided by a carer match the infant’s cognitive requirements? How well can carers support higher performance cognition in infants? How closely coupled can infant computational needs and carer response be? The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott remarked that: “There is no such thing as a baby, only a baby and a mother” [14, page 39]. Winnicott’s view of a closely integrated mother-infant dyad is consonant with the idea of carers extending the minds of infants they care for. What this means is that if the infant’s ongoing computational needs are met by sensitive and timely support from his or her carer then we might say that the carers cognitive support has become part of the infant’s extended mind. Clark shows how language extends minds: “First, the simple act of labelling the world opens up a variety of new computational opportunities and supports the discovery of abstract patterns in nature. Second, encountering or recalling structured sentences supports the development of otherwise unattainable kinds of expertise. And third, linguistic structures contribute to some of the most important yet conceptually complex of all human capacities: our ability to reflect on our own thoughts and characters and our limited but genuine capacity to control and guide the shape and contents of our own thinking” [4, page 44] From our current perspective of exploring how attachment figures may extend infant minds we can see that they may be viewed as fulfilling the same three roles that Clark ascribes to language. That is, caregivers can also help label and conceptualise, structure, and facilitate self-reflection. In developing a framework to explain the origin of the socially extended mind, this paper draws upon Attachment Theory as an existing well-developed theory which is focused upon long term intimate social and emotional interactions, including how trust is formed and can be lost in close relationships. Attachment Theory is also based upon an information processing foundation which facilitates theorizing in terms of internal and external cognition. Serving as mind extension is clearly part of what attachment theorists mean when they say that an attachment figure enables one to ‘live a bigger life’ than would otherwise be possible. After showing how the information processing foundation for Attachment Theory leaves it well placed to be augmented with inclusion of socially extended mind mechanisms, this paper will assess how an Attachment Theory extended in this way is relevant to mental health issues. 2 INTRODUCTION TO ATTACHMENT THEORY Prior to the second war, medical and social scientists understood very little about the nature of human relationships and the security they can bring to an individual. Then, about the time that Alan Turing was making brilliant contributions to his country’s security and the field of cybernetics was being formed, the child psychiatrist John Bowlby began publishing seminal insights into the nature of the child’s tie to its carers and the origins of interpersonal security. Bowlby’s attachment theory grew to include insights from numerous disciplines including psychoanalysis, ethology, cybernetics, cognitive and developmental psychology, and artificial intelligence [2]. The theoretical framework provided by Bowlby has structured and focused the empirical observations of attachment interactions in diverse contexts. These contexts include interactions between infants and children and their caregivers; between romantic partners in adolescence and adulthood; in typical and pathological populations; and observing attachment relations from a biological and comparative psychology perspective. Together they provide a rich description of attachment related affect, behaviour and cognitions, and information about the contexts in which they occur information essential to building and evaluating computational attachment models and simulations [11]. Bowlby’s initial research focus was towards understanding particular normative attachment related social and emotional phenomena such as: the separation distress exhibited by children when they or their mothers were absent due to the infant’s or mother’s hospitalization; the effect of early maternal deprivation on later development; and grief and mourning in infancy [2]. One of Bowlby’s early goals was to construct a scientifically respectable attachment motivation theory that could account for an infant behaviour’s sensitivity to social context. To accomplish this, he first turned to ethology and developed a framework that described the attachment system as an instinctive behaviour system. However, in his more mature theoretical work, Bowlby drew increasingly on control systems theory and on AI based representations such as internal working models (IWMs) and hierarchical plans. This means that the information processing explanations for attachment phenomena can be integrated with newly proposed information processing structures and mechanisms such at those suggested by the Extended Mind framework [12]. 3 THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ATTACHMENT THEORY 3.1 Ethological underpinnings Attachment Theory is an evolutionary theory which was founded upon the Behaviour System concept from Ethology. In this framework Behaviour Systems control behaviours such as mating, fighting and feeding. Each Behaviour System carries out a species specific function, and has survived in the genome because its functions contribute to biological fitness. Therefore Behaviour Systems are related to one meaning of the term ‘instinct’ [10]. The Behaviour Systems that Bowlby linked to attachment behaviour in human infants are the attachment, fear, sociability and exploration systems [2]. The behaviour systems most closely related to attachment are inherently motivated [9]. This means that infants will work to experience exploration, socialisation and security. These outcomes are therefore primary drives that are not activated as the by-product of any more fundamental process. Behaviour Systems within the Attachment Control System allow a flexible repertoire of behaviours to be produced when pursuing currently active goals. What defines the attachment control system and its constituent behaviours is the outcomes that reliably follow from activating these behaviours. For example, if an infant is anxious and its current goal is to increase its proximity to a carer the infant may cry (which predictably brings the carer closer), or crawl towards the carer themselves. Of course, crying and crawling may also be activated by other behaviour systems, such as, respectively hunger or exploration. For Bowlby, behaviours resulting from the attachment behaviour system and the fear system have the predictable o