This paper, an expanded version of a talk on love given to a literary society, attempts to analyse some of the architectural requirements for an agent which is capable of having primary, secondary and tertiary emotions, including being infatuated or in love. It elaborates on work done previously in the Birmingham Cognition and Affect group, describing our proposed three level architecture (with reactive, deliberative and metamanagement layers), showing how different sorts of emotions relate to those layers. Some of the relationships between emotional states involving partial loss of control of attention (e.g. emotional states involved in being in love) and other states which involve dispositions (e.g. attitudes such as loving) are discussed and related to the architecture. The work of poets and playwrights can be shown to involve an implicit commitment to the hypothesis that minds are (at least) information processing engines. Besides loving, many other familiar states and process...

There is much shallow thinking about emotions, and a huge diversity of definitions of “emotion ” arises out of this shallowness. Too often the definitions and theories are inspired either by a mixture of introspection and selective common sense, or by a misdirected neo-behaviourist methodology, attempting to define emotions and other mental states in terms of observables. One way to avoid such shallowness, and perhaps eventually achieve convergence, is to base concepts and theories on an information processing architecture, which is subject to various constraints, including evolvability, implementability, coping with resource-limited physical mechanisms, and human-like functionality. Within such an architecture-based theory we can distinguish (at least) primary emotions, secondary emotions, and tertiary emotions, and produce a coherent theory which explains a wide range of phenomena and also partly explains the diversity of theories: most theorists focus on only a subset of types of emotions.

A problem which bedevils the study of emotions, and the study of consciousness, is that we assume a shared understanding of many everyday concepts, such as `emotion', `feeling', `pleasure', `pain', `desire', `awareness', etc. Unfortunately, these concepts are inherently very complex, ill-defined, and used with different meanings by different people. Moreover this goes unnoticed, so that people think they understand what they are referring to even when their understanding is very unclear. Consequently there is much discussion that is inherently vague, often at cross-purposes, and with apparent disagreements that arise out of people unwittingly talking about different things. We need a framework which explains how there can be all the diverse phenomena that different people refer to when they talk about emotions and other affective states and processes. The conjecture on which this paper is based is that adult humans have a type of information-processing architecture, with components whi...

There are evolutionary trajectories in two different but related spaces, design space and niche space. Co-evolution occurs in parallel trajectories in both spaces, with complex feedback loops linking them. As the design of one species evolves, that changes the niche for others and vice versa. In general there will never be a unique answer to the question: does this change lead to higher fitness? Rather there will be tradeoffs: the new variant is better in some respects and worse in others. Where large numbers of mutually interdependent species (designs) are co-evolving, understanding the dynamics can be very difficult. If intelligent organisms manipulate some of the mechanisms, e.g. by mate selection or by breeding other animals or their own kind, the situation gets even more complicated. It may be possible to show how some aspects of the evolution of human minds are explained by all these mechanisms.

This paper discusses some of the requirements for the control architecture of an intelligent human-like agent with multiple independent dynamically changing motives in a dynamically changing only partly predictable world. The architecture proposed includes a combination of reactive, deliberative and meta-management mechanisms along with one or more global \alarm " systems. The engineering design requirements are discussed in relation our evolutionary history, evidence of brain function and recent theories of Damasio and others about the relationships between intelligence and emotions. 1.

Abstract not found

Despite being of crucial importance in Education, the issue of motivation has been only very recently explicitly addressed in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS). In the few studies done, the main focus has been on motivational planning (i.e. how to plan the instruction in order to motivate the student). In this paper we argue that motivation diagnosis (i.e. how to detect the student's motivational state) is of crucial importance for creating `motivating' ITSs, and that more research is needed in this area. After an introduction, we review some relevant research on motivation diagnosis, and then we suggest directions which further research in this area might take. Although the issues discussed here are still poorly understood, this paper attempts to encourage research in the ITS community in what we believe is one of the most important aspects of instruction.

Abstract. We propose and evaluate a decision-theoretic approach for selecting tutorial actions by looking ahead to anticipate their effects on the student and other aspects of the tutorial state. The approach uses a dynamic decision network to consider the tutor's uncertain beliefs and objectives in adapting to and managing the changing tutorial state. Prototype action selection engines for diverse domains- calculus and elementary reading- illustrate the approach. These applications employ a rich model of the tutorial state, including attributes such as the student's knowledge, focus of attention, affective state, and next action(s), along with task progress and the discourse state. For this study, neither of our action selection engines had been integrated into a complete ITS, so we used simulated students to evaluate their capabilities to select rational tutorial actions that emulate the behaviors of human tutors. We also evaluated their capability to select tutorial actions quickly enough for real-world tutoring applications.

This paper presents a critical view of the status quo of some of the emerging research efforts on emotional agents. It attempts to isolate (at least roughly) some of the reasons why emotional agents may be desirable and points to the difficulties of making notions of emotion precise. It lists various problems connected to emotional agents and concludes that it is counterproductive to the whole endeavor of understanding and modeling emotions if "emotion labels" are conferred upon states of agents prematurely without justification.

www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc Chapter 19 in Roberts, M. J. (Ed.) (2007). Integrating the mind: Domain general versus domain specific processes in higher cognition (pp. 449–491). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.