Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

architectural basis of affect 221
robots of various types. The varieties of emotion, desire, or consciousness
that can occur in a newborn infant are different from those that are possible
in adults. Unfortunately, there is no agreed-upon terminology for discussing
varieties of architecture so that we can pose questions about which sorts
of mental state and process are possible in which sorts of architecture. We
therefore present a schematic framework for describing architectures, named
“CogAff” because it was developed in the Cognition and Affect project at the
University of Birmingham. This schema defines a high-level ontology for components
and connections between components, in a wide range of informationprocessing
architectures, though it does not cover all possibilities.
CogAff: A Schema Allowing Multiple Types of Emotion
The generic CogAff architecture schema sketched in Figures 8.1 and 8.2
covers a wide variety of types of possible (virtual machine) architectures for
organisms or robots, which vary in the types of sophistication in their perceptual
mechanisms, their motor mechanisms, and their “central” processing
mechanisms, as well as in the kinds of connectivity between submechanisms.
For instance, central processes can be purely reactive, in the sense of
producing immediate (internal or external) actions without the use of any
Central
Perception Action
Processing
Meta-management
(reflective processes)
(newest)
Deliberative reasoning
("what if" mechanisms)
(older)
Reactive mechanisms
(oldest)
Figure 8.1. The CogAff schema developed in the Cognition and Affect
project: two kinds of architectural subdivision are superimposed. One
distinguishes perception, central processing, and action. The other (more
distinctive) distinguishes three levels: reactive, deliberative, and reflective.
Many information flow-paths are possible between the boxes.