Emotions as a bridge to the environment: the role of body in organisms and robots.
Carlos Herrera Pérez, David C. Moffat and Tom Ziemke
Simulation of Adaptive Behavior 2006 (SAB 2006)
Rome, Italy, 25-29 September 2006
Summary
For the Dynamical Systems (DS) approach to cognition adaptive agents exhibit tightly coupled interactions between nervous system, body and environment. Parisi recently suggested that the current focus on sensorimotor interaction between agent and environment needs to be complemented by an "internal robotics", i.e. modeling of the interaction between internal physiology and nervous system in, for example, emotional mechanisms. In this paper we try to integrate Parisi’s proposal with concepts from DS and emotion theory to provide a model of the mechanisms underlying the appraisal process; and discuss how these mechanisms can be understood in DS terms and modelled in animats. The DS notion of “collective variable” can help understanding such interactions. In emotions physiological states are collective parameters that trace the global dynamic concern relevance of the situation. Such variables may be key, in adaptive systems, to monitoring and controlling the agent’s interaction with the external environment. We show in a simple robotic experiment that the neural controller can self-organize to exploit the dynamical regularities traced by these variables. We conclude this can prove to be a useful technique in robots and animats, towards evolving emotion-based, adaptive behaviors.