Modeling the Effects of Emotion on Cognition

Abstract

Understanding the interaction between emotion and cognitive processes is important for developing architectures for general intelligence, and vital for the fields of human social and behavioral modeling, game intelligence, and human-computer interaction. However, relatively little work in AI has been done on emotion in intelligent architectures, particularly on the effect of emotions on cognitive processes such as inference, planning and learning, despite research showing that emotion is a crucial and often beneficial factor in human decision-making. My work will provide a new emotional-cognitive architecture, focusing on a small set of theories, mechanisms and algorithms for the modeling of a wide array of emotional effects on human cognitive processes. The work and its results will be evaluated against current computational models of cognition and emotion, and validated by results from human cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology.