Abstract
Social allostasis is a mechanism of adaptation that permits individuals to dynamically adapt their physiology to changing physical and social conditions. Oxytocin (OT) is widely considered to be one of the hormones that drives and adapts social behaviours. While its precise effects remain unclear, two areas where OT may promote adaptation are by affecting social salience, and affecting internal responses of performing social behaviours. Working towards a model of dynamic adaptation through social allostasis in simulated embodied agents, and extending our previous work studying OT-inspired modulation of social salience, we present a model and experiments that investigate the effects and adaptive value of allostatic processes based on hormonal (OT) modulation of affective elements of a social behaviour. In particular, we investigate and test the effects and adaptive value of modulating the degree of satisfaction of tactile contact in a social motivation context in a small simulated agent society across different environmental challenges (related to availability of food) and effects of OT modulation of social salience as a motivational incentive. Our results show that the effects of these modulatory mechanisms have different (positive or negative) adaptive value across different groups and under different environmental circumstance in a way that supports the context-dependent nature of OT, put forward by the interactionist approach to OT modulation in biological agents. In terms of simulation models, this means that OT modulation of the mechanisms that we have described should be context-dependent in order to maximise viability of our socially adaptive agents, illustrating the relevance of social allostasis mechanisms.
Highlights
Prior to adding the OT modulatory mechanism to dynamically modulate the degree of physiological satisfaction of the social behavior Touch, in a first experiment we investigated the effects of increasing and decreasing social salience using different static values, in a more thorough way than we had done in previous work [2], taken from the range 5%–100% of the maximum value that the parameter touchingIntensity can take
As the values of touchingIntensity increase beyond 20%, the picture changes and Decreased Social Salience groups become comparable to Increased Social Salience groups in terms of viability, whereas for lower levels of touchingIntensity, Decreased Social Salience is detrimental to the viability of agents, both in terms of absolute life length and overall comfort
We have presented a model of social adaptation using mechanisms of social allostasis that investigate how adapting the physiological response of simulated embodied social agents (n = 6)
Summary
Animals—including humans—who exist in social groups have evolved by reacting and adapting their behaviours to their physical environment, and to the changing dynamics of their society, developing skills for understanding social hierarchies, forming relationships and bonds with others, and learning how to react to threats and predators in order to maximise survival. How individuals adapt their (social) behaviours can be attributed to many mechanisms, one of which is affect [1]. Building upon our previous work [2], this study investigates how dynamically adapting an agent’s internal response to tactile
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