Understanding Behaviour from the Ground Up: Constructing Robots to Reveal Simple Mechanisms Underlying Complex Behaviour

Abstract

Students often have difficulty getting past the use of folk-psychological terms (e.g., wants, loves, fears) when explaining behaviour. They assume that complex behaviours require similarly complex causal structures. For this study, the authors developed a two-week robotics project to demonstrate that complex behaviours can also emerge from simple mechanisms. The project combined lectures, demonstrations of simple robots, and hands-on robot building and observing. Evaluations showed that students enjoyed the project, and essays revealed that they learned from the experience. The project accomplished four goals: (1) engaged students in generating and testing hypotheses, (2) demonstrated the power of a mechanistic approach, (3) showed how social behaviour can arise from simple behaviours of individuals, and (4) illustrated how natural selection operates at the level of the whole organism.