Intelligent Social Learning
CPM Report No.: 00-59
By: Rosario Conte
Date: 2nd May 2000
A Paper at: The "Starting from
Society" symposium at ASIB'2000
convention, Birmingham University, 16th-19th April 2000.
Also published as: Rosario Conte (2000), "Intelligent Social
Learning", in the Proceedings of the AISB'00 Symposium on Starting from Society
- the Application of Social Analogies to Computational Systems, Birmingham, UK:
AISB, 1-13. (ISBN 1 902956 13 8)
Abstract
One of the cognitive processes responsible for social propagation is social learning, broadly
meant as the process by means of which agents' acquisition of new information is caused or
favoured by their being exposed to one another in a common environment. Social learning
results from one or other of a number of social phenomena, the most important of which are
social facilitation and imitation. In this paper, a general notion of social learning will be defined
and the main processes which are responsible for it, namely social facilitation and imitation, will
be analysed in terms of the social mental processes they require. A brief analysis of classical
definitions of social learning is carried on, showing that a systematic and consistent treatment of
this notion is still missing. A general notion of social learning is then introduced and the two main
processes which may lead to it, social facilitation and imitation, will be defined as different steps
on a continuum of cognitive complexity. Finally, the utility of the present approach is discussed.
The analysis presented in this paper draws upon a cognitive model of social action (cf. Conte &
Castelfranchi, 1995; Conte, 1999). The agent model which will be referred to throughout the
paper is a cognitive model, endowed with mental properties for pursuing goals and intentions,
and for knowledge-based action. To be noted, a cognitive agent is not to be necessarily meant
as a natural system, although many examples examined in the paper are drawn from the real
social life of humans. Cognitive agents may also be artificial systems endowed with the capacity
for reasoning, planning, and decision-making about both world and mental states. The
interesting question concerning artificial systems is, what are the mechanisms which must be
implemented at the agent level to enable them to learn from one another? Are the mechanisms
allowing agents to learn from their physical environment sufficient for them to learn also from or
perhaps through their social environment? If not, which additional properties are needed? And,
earlier than this, what does social learning mean, which social phenomena are referred to by
this notion?
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