The below video clip is one of many ive collected as research basis for the work I am doing with my pleo robot. Pleo arrived last week in the mail and new videos of me and the robot are coming soon! I am currently exploring the attachment relationship and the responses of the robot to my touching, cooing, and cuddling, versus my neglecting and ignoring it. I am already disturbed by my own work.

I have been re-watching the Ainsworth 'Strange Situation', and videos by Harry Harlow (clip below). Both were developmental psychologists whose experiments in the mid-twentieth century fleshed out the behavioral basis of infant mother attachment and further research on the importance of the developmental environment. This work is still considered highly important today.

This is essentially work that I studied while in the harvard mind-brain-behavior program (i used to analyze these videos for papers).

This seminal series of experiments revealed to scientists the already quite obvious nature of infant-mother attachment. I find them quite disturbing and hard to watch. There are several of these on youtube that document the range of the work conducted by harlow and his colleagues. Here is one he did with Rhesus monkeys and their preferences for non-feeding 'cloth mothers' versus wire mothers with bottles full of milk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLrBrk9DXVk&feature=related

Comments welcomed. I will upload my own videos soon.