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A Neuroscientific View on the Role of Emotions in Behaving Cognitive Agents

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Abstract

While classical theories systematically opposed emotion and cognition, suggesting that emotions perturbed the normal functioning of the rational thought, recent progress in neuroscience highlights on the contrary that emotional processes are at the core of cognitive processes, directing attention to emotionally-relevant stimuli, favoring the memorization of external events, valuating the association between an action and its consequences, biasing decision making by allowing to compare the motivational value of different goals and, more generally, guiding behavior towards fulfilling the needs of the organism. This article first proposes an overview of the brain areas involved in the emotional modulation of behavior and suggests a functional architecture allowing to perform efficient decision making. It then reviews a series of biologically-inspired computational models of emotion dealing with behavioral tasks like classical conditioning and decision making, which highlight the computational mechanisms involved in emotional behavior. It underlines the importance of embodied cognition in artificial intelligence, as emotional processing is at the core of the cognitive computations deciding which behavior is more appropriate for the agent.

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Notes

  1. Classical conditioning (or Pavlovian conditioning) is the learned pairing of an unconditioned stimulus (US, e.g. food) that produces an unconditioned response (UR, e.g. salivation) with a conditioned stimulus (CS, e.g. a bell) presented a certain amount of time before the US. After sufficient learning, the appearance of the CS produces a conditioned response (CR) that is similar to the UR.

  2. Reversal learning is a form of operant conditioning where the consequences of two well-learned actions are reversed: if the action A systematically led to reward and B to punishment, the experimenters look how fast the animal adapts its behavior when A suddenly leads to punishment and B to reward.

  3. Extinction learning is a form of classical conditioning where a learned CS is no longer associated to an US (or an action to it outcome).

  4. Random dots discrimination task consists in the visual presentation of an array of randomly moving dots, biased on average towards a particular direction (e.g. left or right). The subject has to guess this direction of movement. Reaction times typically increase with the difficulty (or uncertainty) of the task.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are in part supported by the German research foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) grant (DFG HA2630/4-2) “The cognitive control of visual perception and action selection”.

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  1. Fakultät für Informatik, Technische Universität Chemnitz, Straße der Nationen 62, 09107, Chemnitz, Deutschland

    Julien Vitay & Fred H. Hamker

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  1. Julien Vitay
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  2. Fred H. Hamker
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Correspondence to Fred H. Hamker.

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Vitay, J., Hamker, F.H. A Neuroscientific View on the Role of Emotions in Behaving Cognitive Agents. Künstl Intell 25, 235–244 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-011-0106-y

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