Abstract The development of a sense of agency is indispensable for a cognitive entity (biological or artificial) to become a cognitive agent. In developmental psychology, researchers have taken inspiration from adult cognitive psychology and neuroscience literature and use the comparator model to assess the presence of a sense of agency in early infancy. Similarly, robotics researchers have taken components of the proposed mechanism in attempts to build a sense of agency into artificial systems. In this article, we identify an invalidating theoretical flaw in the reasoning underlying this conversion from adult studies to developmental science and cognitive systems research, rooted in an oversight in the conceptualization of the comparator model as currently used in experimental practice. In these experiments, the emphasis has been put solely on testing for a match between predicted and observed sensory consequences. We argue that the match by itself can exclusively generate a simple categorization or a representation of equality between predicted and observed sensory consequences, both of which are insufficient to generate the causal representations required for a sense of agency. Consequently, the comparator model, as it has been described in the context of the sense of agency and as it is commonly used in experimental designs, is insufficient to generate the sense of agency: infants and robots require more than developing the ability to match predicted and observed sensory consequences for a sense of agency. We conclude with outlining possible solutions and future directions for researchers in developmental science and artificial intelligence.

中文翻译：

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匹配没有意义：关于比较器模型的充分性可以用来解释代理感

摘要代理意识的发展对于认知实体（生物的或人工的）成为认知主体是必不可少的。在发展心理学中，研究人员从成人认知心理学和神经科学文献中汲取了灵感，并使用比较器模型评估了婴儿早期的代理意识。同样，机器人研究人员也采用了拟议机制的组成部分，试图在人工系统中建立代理感。在本文中，我们确定了从成人研究到发展科学和认知系统研究的这种转换所基于的推理中的无效理论缺陷，其根源在于对目前在实验实践中使用的比较器模型的概念化的监督。在这些实验中 重点仅放在测试预测和观察到的感觉结果之间是否匹配上。我们认为，匹配本身可以专门产生简单的分类或预测和观察到的感官结果之间的相等性表示，这两者均不足以产生代理感所需的因果表示。因此，比较器模型（已在代理感的背景下进行了描述，并且通常在实验设计中使用）不足以产生代理感：婴儿和机器人需要的不仅仅是开发与预期匹配的能力并观察到感觉上的后果，从而产生代理感。最后，我们概述了发展科学和人工智能研究人员的可能解决方案和未来方向。