Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

architectural basis of affect 229
ferent stages of development. Moreover, humans have many subsystems that
evolved long ago and still exist in other animals, where they are sometimes
easier to study. We should also be open to the possibility of biological discoveries
of architectures that do not fit our schema, for which the schema
will have to be extended. Moreover, we are not restricted to what is biologically
plausible. We can also consider architectures for future possible robots.
EXAMPLES OF ARCHITECTURE-BASED CONCEPTS
We are extending folk-psychological architectures in the framework of the
CogAff schema (Fig. 8.1), which supports a wide variety of architectures.
An example is our tentatively proposed special case, the H-CogAff architecture
offered as a first draft theory of the human virtual information processing
architecture. In the more specific context of H-CogAff, we can
distinguish more varieties of emotions than are normally distinguished (and
more varieties of perceiving, learning, deciding, attending, acting). However,
it is likely that the ontology for mental states and processes that will emerge
from more advanced versions of H-CogAff (or its successors) will be far more
complex than anyone now imagines.
We shall offer some examples of words normally regarded as referring
to emotions and show how to analyze them in the context of an architecture.
We start with a proposal for a generic definition of emotion that might
cover many states that are of interest to psychologists who are trying to
understand emotions in human as well as to roboticists intending to study
the utility of emotional control in artifacts. This is an elaboration of ideas
originally in Simon (1967/1979).
Toward a Generic Definition of “Emotion”
We start from the assumption that in any information-processing system there
are temporally extended processes that sometimes require more time to
complete a task than is available because of the speed with which external
events occur. For example, the task of working out how to get some food
that is out of reach may not be finished by the time a large, fast-approaching
object is detected, requiring evasive action. An operating system might be
trying to write data to a memory device, but the user starts disconnecting
the device before the transfer is complete. It may be useful to have a process
which detects such cases and interrupts normal functioning, producing
a very rapid default response, taking high priority over everything else, to
avoid file corruption. In Figure 8.2, we used the label “alarm mechanism”