Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

360 conclusions
directly and by providing positive or negative reinforcement for
learning processes that will affect perceptual, motor, and other
schemas. Figure 12.1 shows the latter in terms of the action of
dopamine neurons providing the reinforcement for an actor–
critic architecture for reinforcement learning in the basal ganglia
(Fellous & Suri, 2003; Prescott, Gurney, & Redgrave, 2003).
3. The hippocampus provides a representation of context, most
notably by activation of place cells encoding the animal’s place
in space. Dynamic remapping is the process whereby this representation
may be updated on the basis of an efferent copy of
the animal’s actions even when sensory data on the new context
or location may be missing.
4. The hippocampal representation is now seen in greater generality
as encoding any situation that is linked to a node in the
animal’s WG. Thus, the hippocampus is seen as providing the
“you are here” function; it must be integrated with the WG to
provide a full cognitive map linking current position with current
goals to determine a path through the world which will
achieve one or more of them. Thus, premotor action selection
becomes embedded within the prefrontal planning behavior
associated with the WG, planning which depends crucially on
representations of goal states and internal states (inputs not
shown) as well as a combination of the current situation and the
available affordances (Guazzelli, Bota, & Arbib, 2001).
An Evolutionary Approach to Heated Appraisals
In item (3) of the analysis of my emotional narrative (see above, “The Narrative
Chronologically Rearranged and Annotated”), I stated the following:
an emotional state may be “terminated” when a plan is completed
which addresses the source of that state; or it may simply dissipate
when alternative plans are made. However, if some major goal has
been rendered unattainable by some event, the negative emotion
associated with the event may not be dissipated by embarking on
other plans, since they do not approach the goal.
This analysis, and others elsewhere in the above section, seems at first to be
very much in the spirit of appraisal theories of emotion (e.g., Ortony, Clore,
& Collins, 1988). However, while Ortony, Clore and Collins admit that visceral
sensations and facial expressions set emotions apart from other psychological
states, they exclude these from their study (Arbib, 1992). They