ATTENTION, MOTIVATION AND EMOTION IN COGNITIVE SOFTWARE AGENTS

The observations that the emotional phenomenon is an essencial component to the living beings cognition has influenced the conception of artificial intelligent mechanisms. This influence has lead to the discussion whether it is possible to elaborate an inteligent system without including into it the emotions's role. The proposed model implements an affective mechanism inside an architecture to build cognitive software agents, called ARTIFICE. Its conception was inspired in a biological bottom-up approach for classifying affections considering ideas and neuroscientific concepts about emotions and their influence on learning. Also it is considered that the attention, motivation and emotion are interdependent aspects that need to be considered together by an affective mechanism. The main objective of this work is to reproduce the adaptive functions of survival value in software. Moreover this study also aims to presents how the autonomy in artificial organisms can be acquired inserting appropriate synthetic emotions. The experiments suggest that the model is appropriate to allow agents to adapt themselves in generic environments, according to their incorporated affective structures. Their learning was accomplished solely from live interaction experiences with environment and other existing entities. No previous information about the artificial world were built-in into these agents.