Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

eware the passionate robot 351
vidual movements that form it so that one may relate F5 neurons to various
motor schemas corresponding to the action associated with their discharge.
The FARS model (named for Fagg, Arbib, Rizzolatti & Sakata; Fagg &
Arbib, 1998) provides a computational account centered on the pathway:
AIP (object affordances) → (F5 canonical (abstract motor schemas)
→ F1 (motor cortex instructions to lower
motor areas and motor neurons)
Figure 12.1 gives a view of “FARS Modificato,” the FARS model updated
on the basis of suggestions by Rizzolatti and Luppino (2003), based
on the neuroanatomical data reviewed Rizzolatti and Luppino (2001), so
that information on object semantics and the goals of the individual influences
AIP rather than F5 neurons, as was the case in Fagg and Arbib (1998).
The dorsal stream via the AIP does not know what the object is; it can only
see the object as a set of possible affordances (it lies on the how pathway).
The ventral stream (from primary visual cortex to inferotemporal cortex),
by contrast, is able to recognize what the object is. This information is passed
Figure 12.1. A reconceptualization of the FARS model (Fagg & Arbib, 1998),
in which the primary influence of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) on the selection
of affordances is on the parietal cortex (AIP, anterior intraparietal
sulcus) rather than the premotor cortex (hand area F5). This diagram
includes neither the circuitry encoding a sequence, possibly the part of the
supplementary motor area called the pre-SMA (Rizzolatti, Luppino, &
Matelli, 1998), nor the administration of the sequence (inhibiting extraneous
actions, while priming imminent actions) by the basal ganglia.