An Emotion-Based "Conscious" Software Agent Architecture

Evidence of the role of emotions in the action selection processes of environmentally situated agents continues to mount. This is no less true for autonomous software agents. Here we are concerned with such software agents that model a psychological theory of consciousness, global workspace theory. We briefly describe the architecture of two such agents, CMattie and IDA, and the role emotions play in each. Both agents communicate with humans in natural language, the first about seminars and the like, the second about job possibilities. IDA must also deliberate on various scenarios and negotiate with humans. In CMattie emotions occur in response to incoming stimuli from the environment and affect behavior indirectly by strengthening or weakening drives. In IDA the emotions are integrated with the “consciousness” mechanism, and bidirectionally connected with all the major parts of the architecture. Thus, emotions will affect, and be affected by, essentially all of the agent’s disparate cognitive processes. They will thus play a role in essentially all cognitive activity including perception, memory, “consciousness,” action selection, learning, and metacognition. These emotional connections will provide a common currency among the several modules of the agent architecture. These connections will also allow for the learning of complex emotions. The emotions serve to tell the agent how well it’ s doing. Introduction Evidence continues to mount for the role of emotions in environmentally situated human agents (LeDoux and Hirst 1986,Damasio 1994, Rolls 1999). The verdict is still out on exactly how the emotions affect cognition in humans, but there does seem to be general agreement that they play a more important role than previously believed. Neuroscientist Walter Freeman sees emotions as “essential aspects of, but subordinate to, intentionality, perception and the construction of meaning.” (1999, p. 96) CMattie and IDA are environmentally situated software agents that will utilize emotional mechanisms to help direct attention, learn from situations that generate “good” or “bad” emotional states, and make evaluations of external stimuli and internal states. Including emotional capabilities in non-biological autonomous agents is not a new idea (Bates et al. 1991, Sloman & Poli 1996, Picard 1997). However, as more information is learned regarding the functions and architecture of emotions in humans, we must constantly reevaluate our models in light of these emerging ideas. One such idea is the notion that emotions are closely linked to almost all aspects of cognition and that they may provide the initial building blocks for conscious thought in infants (Watt 1998). Partially motivated by recent discoveries of the role emotions play in human cognition, we are reevaluating their role in the cognitive processes of our two software agents, CMattie and IDA. In CMattie emotions affect action selection by strengthening or weakening her primary motivators, her drives. They don’ t directly affect perception, behaviors, the process of memory, or metacognition. What’s now known about the role of emotions in human cognition suggests that they should. Also, though emotions affect CMattie’s actions, those actions don’ t affect her emotions. Not so with humans. With these issues in mind, we intend to significantly broaden the role of emotions in our more complex agent, IDA. We also intend to see that that role is bi-directional so that each of IDA’s cognitive modules also affects her emotions. In this paper we will describe the high level design for this reevaluation and re-implementation of the role of emotions in “conscious” software agents. 1 Supported in part by ONR grant N00014-98-1-0332 2 With essential contributions from the Conscious Software Research Group