Socio-cognitive agents should be able to support an agent’s reasoning about other social actors and its relationship with them. Cognitive social frames can be built around social groups, and form the basis for social group dynamics mechanisms and construct of social identity.
A socio-cognitive agent must selectively deploy its cognitive resources, hence adapting its behavior, according to the social context.2.2. Social Context and Construal
1.2. Social Context and Construal
From the objects available around people to their relationships with other social actors, the entities that surround people have a direct influence on their cognitive processes. Nevertheless, not all humans ascribe similar meanings to the same entities they see in the physical world. In addition to the sensory experience that generates a perception, people construct mental representations of the world that are subject to an interpretative process. One of the theories that explained the relationship of the self with the social reality is symbolic interactionism [8]. First proposed by George Mead and later published by Herbert Blumer, the theory proposes that individuals interact with each other based on the symbolic world they construct. Since “humans act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things.”, people can establish a link between their personal and unique view of entities and use it to adapt their cognition. Moreover, by arguing that “the meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters” the authors emphasize that interpretation plays an important role when trying to understand the social world people interact with. When endowing intelligent agents with the ability to selectively filter their computational processes based on the context they are placed in, there needs to be an explicit connection between the external world and their internal resources. Castelfranchi proposed that both physical context (relation to the environment) and social context (relation to other social actors) were noteworthy elements that influenced the agent’s autonomy [9]. Additionally, several researchers identified the importance of social context in the classification of agents as “socially believable” [10][11]. To be portrayed as such, an external observer should be able to perceive as meaningful the connection between the agent’s identity, its behavior and the social context. From embodied virtual agents to social robots, the inclusion of autonomous agents in people’s society requires them to understand people’s current practices and adhere to them when appropriate. Using the physical reality might enable them to understand what the environment affords. However, this is not enough. In addition to exploring the deployment of cognitive resources based on world entities with physical properties, agents must rely on the relationship between such elements and their frame of reference. Endowing them with the capability to reason on top of the social context that represents a network of relationships between objects and social actors will improve their chances of being perceived by humans as socially believable. Following some theorists’ proposals, the design of social agents must include a representation of the social context, that results from an interpretative process that refines and extends the sensory stimulus with social meaning. Therefore: A socio-cognitive agent must be able to construct social context by means of interpretative processes that ascribe social meaning to its sensory information.21.3. Social Categorization and Identity
Allport studied human’s natural process for thinking about others in terms of their group memberships by means of social categorization [12]. As part of their social nature, people tend to categorize other social actors on the basis of their social groups’ memberships. Therefore, being able to recognize others’ social groups, a person can also identify himself based on his relationship to such groups. This interaction between one’s identity as a group member and the inter-group’s dynamics was elaborated by social identity theory [13]. It proposes that people are capable of constructing their social identity based on their relationship with other social groups. Later, Adams and Hoggs predicted that social identities can be taken as required by the situation, the social context [14]. Together, both formulations suggest that humans can assume an identity as they see fit while being capable of recognizing, and comparing to others’ memberships. Brewer further elaborated on the inter-group behavior, by proposing that one, when adopting a social identity, balances the similarities with other in-group members and the distinction between in-group and out-group [15] members. Owens et al. [16] studied two types of identity: role identities and personal identities. The first refers to identities that can only exist when a relevant counter-part is also present, for example, one cannot be a mother without children. However, personal identity reflects one’s traits or characteristics that are not linked to others’ social or role identities. As such, role identities present an interesting way of adjusting one’s cognition based on the relationship with the reality, namely, other social actors. The application of social identity in computational systems is also a challenging task. To design social agents, the notion of social context cannot be the only factor considered. If so, the individual nature of cognition can be lost. Therefore, the inclusion of aspects related to social identity can stimulate the individual differences of agents [4]. This distinction can be traced to people’s different emotional attachment to each social group. Therefore, besides the interpretation of the surroundings, socio-cognitive agents’ architectures must also include mechanisms that allow them to reason about other actors’ memberships and how one fits into the social world. Social identity theory can provide insight into the mechanisms an agent must accommodate to identify social categories and be able to define social groups. Furthermore, when placed together with other social actors, social agents must be capable of understanding the relationship between social groups. Ultimately, while endowed with the possibility to recognizing others’ memberships and relate itself to them, an agent should be capable of constructing its own social identity that reflects its preferences and personal history in the social world. Similar to how social context represents the agent’s interpretation of the physical reality, its social identity serves as a manner to identify how an agent positions itself within the social landscape filled with other social actors distributed in social groups, so: A socio-cognitive agent must be able to attribute social categories to social actors and understand their social meanings and relationship as part of the construction of social context. Additionally, it should be able to position itself in the social categorization space and have preferences over some social categories.21.4. Social Affordances
According to Gibson, affordances are the interactive opportunities offered by the environment to an organism [17]. For instance, a book can afford several types of interactions ranging from interactions that are more common, such as, opening the book or reading its paragraphs, to other less orthodox interactions, such as using it as a cup holder or a wobbly table’s stabilizer. However, an affordance does not live inside the organism nor the environment; it emerges from the ecological relationship between both parties [18]. Moreover, affordances result from the coupling of perceptual information with the organism’s cognitive capabilities. Since Gibson’s theory of affordances was mainly conceived for direct visual perception, his proposal did not detail the role of cognition on the conception of affordances. Nevertheless, Gibson briefly challenged the affordances’ original domain, alluding that other biological perceptions or cultural processes may allow the emergence of other types of affordances. In the past four decades, following his initial contributions, other researchers extended the original theory and explored the cognition’s implications in recognition of affordances. Some researchers proposed that perceptions result from a mental reconstruction of the physical world that is used to update our own internal representation of our surroundings [19]. However, such theories did not consider the role of the organism’s cognition in the perception process. By exploring the cognition’s impact on the theory of affordances, other researchers suggest that perception through sensory inputs is highly influenced by the cognitive capabilities of an organism [20]. For example, Hirsh et al. proposed that perceptions can be understood as interpretations of the sensory input based on past experiences, expectations, and motives [21]. Others suggested that the perceiver’s culture affects salience of some affordances, namely, the ones called social affordances [22]. Zhang and Patel, based on the distributed cognition framework, defined an affordance as a representation shared between the environment and the organism that can be categorized as biological, physical, perceptual, or cognitive [23], where the latter category refers to affordances provided by cultural conventions. Authors from distinct disciplines propose new interpretations to the ambiguous concept of affordance proposed by Gibson, but a common aspect was shared between their theories: cognition guides the attention mechanism that enables organisms to construct their internal representation of the physical reality. The theory of affordance is also relevant while designing computational models for agents, primarily to help construct perceptions based on the resources agents can deploy. Particularly, agents’ architectures should consider potential interactions with other social actors as social affordances. Indeed, some computer science researchers have explored agents’ social affordances across multiple domains. In accordance with Gibson’s theory, Kreijns proposed a definition of social affordance to be applied in computer-supported collaborative learning [24]. The authors highlight the need for the CSCL environment to stimulate the group members’ intervention while reciprocally when a member becomes salient to another, the social affordances must help guide the second member to engage in appropriate interaction with the first. The ecological stance of social affordances also found relevancy across the field of human–robot interaction [25][26]. Whether to improve a robot’s planning capabilities by learning others’ social affordances from the physical environment [27][28], or by learning an affordance grammar from videos [29], approaches that use the theory of affordances can be found in multiple research works about social robots. In practice, social affordances, as proposed by Gibson and later reiterated by other researchers, present an interesting method for designing social agents, particularly to define their interactions with other social actors. By first identifying the bidirectional relationship between the perceiver and the surrounding social world, an agent can recognize opportunities for interaction with others. This principle can be summarized as: A socio-cognitive agent must be able to identify social affordances in the presence of other social actors.21.5. Socially Affordable
Alongside its ecological motivation, social affordances can also bring technical improvements for social agents. Gibson argued that perception is not about passively constructing an internal representation of the world, but rather about actively picking up information of interest to one’s behavior [18]. As such, an agent that only perceives information that is worth considering reduces its set of relevant perceptions. Computationally, it means creating an attention process that allows an agent to filter the perceptions based on their relevancy to its cognition. Nevertheless, this approach may not be sufficient to create agents that are more socially capable. Being able to recognize social affordances, opportunities for interaction with other social actors in the environment, does not necessarily mean that those potential interactions are adequate for the social context. Instead, understanding the distinction between what is possible, the mentioned affordances, and what is appropriate, hence, socially affordable, endows agents with the capability to adhere to social conformity. Let us revisit our previous example, the book’s affordances are directly related to its capabilities and the physical environment the book is placed in. However, as social actors, people also take into account the setting of the interaction and what is deemed appropriate for each context. Although using a book as a cup holder at home might not be questionable, the same action in a library might be inadmissible. The same principle applies to other types of affordances, such as social affordances. Whereas engaging a fellow reader in a library to dance can be considered inappropriate, the same interaction at home may be seen as adequate. To mimic this social awareness into agents through affordances, the environment must be perceived as an enabler of some opportunities that are socially affordable. Thus, an agent must be capable of representing and deploying social information regarded as relevant during the attention process, such as the relationship between other social actors and other physical entities. Such a distinction between affordances, including social, and what is socially affordable, emphasizes the separation between the actions that are deemed possible and the ones that are socially acceptable. This knowledge regarding social conformity grants social agents the capability to engage in interactions with the environment and other social actors that fit their context, therefore: A socio-cognitive agent must be able to recognize which affordances are socially affordable—adequate for the social context.