Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

8
The Architectural Basis of Affective
States and Processes
aaron sloman, ron chrisley,
and matthias scheutz
Much discussion of emotions and related topics is riddled with confusion
because different authors use the key expressions with different meanings.
Some confuse the concept of “emotion” with the more general concept of
“affect,” which covers other things besides emotions, including moods, attitudes,
desires, preferences, intentions, dislikes, etc. Moreover, researchers
have different goals: some are concerned with understanding natural phenomena,
while others are more concerned with producing useful artifacts,
e.g., synthetic entertainment agents, sympathetic machine interfaces, and
the like. We address this confusion by showing how “architecture-based”
concepts can extend and refine our folk-psychology concepts in ways that
make them more useful both for expressing scientific questions and theories,
and for specifying engineering objectives. An implication is that different
information-processing architectures support different classes of
emotions, different classes of consciousness, different varieties of perception,
and so on. We start with high-level concepts applicable to a wide variety
of natural and artificial systems, including very simple organisms—namely,
concepts such as “need,” “function,” “information-user,” “affect,” and
“information-processing architecture.” For more complex architectures, we
offer the CogAff schema as a generic framework that distinguishes types of
components that may be in an architecture, operating concurrently with
different functional roles. We also sketch H-CogAff, a richly featured special