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The caregiving style of parents influences the attachment style their
offspring are likely to form. This project will produce a simulation
that models this phenomenon. The simulation will include a proposed
model of the causal relations that explain how attachment style is
transferred from adult to infant. Starting from the information
processing description of attachment phenomena currently used by
Attachment Theorists, this work proposes architectural explanations of
these phenomena at a greater level of precision and detail. The relevant
individual differences between infants are explained by mechanisms
involved with goals and sub-goal production. The individual differences
between adults are explained by mechanisms involved in attentional
filters. This thesis proposes that perturbances to meta-management may
be caused by biases in attentional filtering. These perturbances are
what give rise to the empirically observed individual differences in
adult attachment behaviour. This research uses a variant of the design
based methodology used in Autonomous Agent research in AI which may
allow a deeper architectural design and a closer mapping between
empirical data and simulation to be produced.