A computational model of emotional attention for autonomous agents

Abstract

A major challenge in artificial intelligence has been the development of autonomous agents (AAs) capable of displaying very believable behaviors. In order to achieve such objective, the underlying architectures of these intelligent systems have been designed to incorporate biologically inspired components. It is expected that through the interaction of this type of components, AAs are able to implement more intelligent and believable behavior. Although the literature reports several computational models of attention and emotions developed to be included in cognitive agent architectures, these have been implemented as two separated processes, disregarding essential interactions between these two human functions whose modeling and computational implementation may increase the believability of behaviors developed by AAs. In this paper, we propose a biologically inspired computational model of emotional attention. This model is designed to provide AAs with adequate mechanisms to attend and react to emotionally salient elements in the environment. The results of four types of simulations performed to evaluate the behavior of AAs implementing the proposed model are presented. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.