180 research outputs found

    Emotion in the Common Model of Cognition

    Get PDF
    Emotions play an important role in human cognition and therefore need to be present in the Common Model of Cognition. In this paper, the emotion working group focuses on functional aspects of emotions and describes what we believe are the points of interactions with the Common Model of Cognition. The present paper should not be viewed as a consensus of the group but rather as a first attempt to extract common and divergent aspects of different models of emotions and how they relate to the Common Model of Cognition

    Fear: A conceptual analysis and philosophical therapy

    Get PDF
    Fear is a critical emotion in everyday life as it permeates many of our minor and major decisions. Explicitly or implicitly, fear is one of the emotions that most strongly shape human life. In this thesis fear and its philosophical remedies will be analysed through the work of western philosophers and thinkers selected based on their overall contributions in conceptualizing fear and suggesting therapies for reducing its more damaging effects. The study will show how Epicurus, Cicero and Seneca considered fear as the main obstacle in achieving peace of mind, and their ethical systems were primarily focused on dealing with this emotion by proposing eclectic philosophical therapies. Montaigne presented a humanist therapy of fear instrumented as a critical self-analysis. In contrast, a reductionist trend in thinking about fear emerged during the 17th century with the growth of materialistic philosophy. Thomas Hobbes reduced fear into a necessary tool for social control, whereas René Descartes demoted fear to a secondary emotion enacted by a dualist mechanism. This trend continued with William James’s conception of fear as a sensory-somatic reflex, and with Sigmund Freud’s hypothesis of a neurotic fear resulting from universal unconscious laws. I will also discuss how current neuroscience has reduced fear to decontextualized neural changes, and how the dominant trend in psychiatry has reified anxiety into arbitrary nomenclatures of unclear validity. On a completely different tack Ludwig Wittgenstein provided a broad ‘perspicuous presentation’ of fear, but his nuanced analysis has been largely ignored in philosophical studies. Overall it can be seen that, in keeping with the scientific revolution, the influential perspectives throughout the philosophical history of fear change from understandings that philosophy itself and reason are the best therapies for fear towards the medicalization of fear that is dominant today. By following these specific and diverse historical convergences, however, their criss-crossing insights and oversights, the thesis aims to enhance the conceptual understanding of fear and the variety of perspectives and therapies available for accommodating its enduring influence in our lives

    Beyond Enlightenment: The Evolution of Agency and the Modularity of the Mind in a Post-Darwinian World

    Get PDF
    Working out of the social and philosophical revolutions from the Enlightenment, contemporary action theory has unwittingly inherited several Cartesian ideas regarding the human mind: that it is unified, rational, and transparent. As a result, we have for too long conceived of action as intimately bound up with reason such that to act at all is to act for a reason, leaving us with theoretical difficulties in accounting for the behavior of non-human animals as well as irrational behavior in human beings. But rather than propose that such difficulties can be resolved by retreating to a pre-Enlightenment view of human nature, the solution is to make the philosophical turn and embrace the insights that have been secured by Charles Darwin. It is a post-Darwinian evolutionary worldview that can shed some new light on these traditional problems. Two such innovations from the theory of evolution have been evolutionary explanations, which attempt to understand the functions of organisms as having developed in response to environmental pressures, and modular theory, which views organisms as composed of parts with highly specialized functions. Taking these evolutionary ideas together along with the assumption of biological continuity—that there is a developmental history shared by living organisms—we can begin to conceive of more robust theories of action, mind, and human nature. Contrary to Enlightenment conceptions, reason emerges as just one mental process alongside many, the mind appears anything but Cartesian, and agency begins far earlier along the spectrum of life than we have been supposing

    Decision-making impairment in emotional disorders

    Full text link
    Decision-making has become the focus of increased scientific attention in recent years. Attempts to characterize decision-making deficits in unipolar mood and anxiety disorders have, however, produced conflicting results. The current study examined two types of impairment, indecisiveness and risky decision-making, in a clinical sample of individuals with depression and/or anxiety. Depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms were hypothesized to predict both self-reported indecisiveness and decision latency on behavioral tasks, with processing speed partially mediating the relationship between psychopathology and decision latency. It was hypothesized that symptoms of OCD and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) would predict advantageous performance on a task assessing risky decision-making, and that executive functioning would partially mediate the relationship between psychopathology and risky decision-making. A sample of individuals (N = 74) who had recently undergone semi-structured diagnostic interviews was recruited for the current study. All participants were diagnosed with at least one unipolar mood or anxiety disorder, with the majority meeting criteria for two or more disorders. All participants completed the same study protocol, which included self-report measures, neuropsychological tests, and computer-administered decision-making tasks. Regression analyses and latent growth modeling were used to examine associations between psychopathology, decision-making, and neuropsychological variables. Self-reported depressive symptoms and OCD symptoms predicted self-reported indecisiveness. Contrary to prediction, psychopathology (when measured dimensionally via self-report measures or operationalized as the presence or absence of a depressive disorder, GAD, or OCD) did not predict decision latency, and there was no evidence of a mediating effect of processing speed. Self-reported depressive symptoms, but not self-reported symptoms of GAD or OCD, were positively associated with ratings of decision difficulty. On a measure of risky decision-making, a diagnosis of GAD and poorer set-shifting were both associated with less improvement in performance over the course of the task, whereas a diagnosis of OCD was associated with more improvement. Results are discussed in the context of the decision-making literature. Methodological challenges to the study of decision-making are addressed and ideas for future research are proposed

    Emotion modelling with human belief revision in computer games

    Get PDF
    163 leaves : ill. (some col) ; 29 cm.Includes abstract and appendices.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-157).Emotion modelling is receiving more and more attention from various fields, e.g. cognitive science, psychology, computer science and neuroscience. Most of these fields share the common research consensus that emotion can be beneficial to human's mental activities. This thesis is also grounded on the same consensus and makes further validations based on the following two hypotheses: One is emotional agents in games should behave more like human beings than emotionless agents; the other is that agents having full emotional architecture should obtain better playing performance than agents with only partial architecture. Based on theoretical support, the author further hypothesizes that peoples' long term belief can be one of the sources to release complex emotions. The experiment result suggests the emotional agents did perform significantly better than emotionless ones, but it was unable to significantly reflect the advantages from fully structured emotional agents over the ones of the partial architecture

    Uma abordagem de consciência de máquina ao controle de semáforos de tráfego urbano

    Get PDF
    Orientador: Ricardo Ribeiro GudwinTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Neste trabalho, apresentamos uma arquitetura cognitiva distribuída usada para o controle de tráfego em uma rede urbana. Essa arquitetura se baseia em uma abordagem de consciência de máquina - Teoria do Workspace Global - de forma a usar competição e difusão em broadcast, permitindo que um grupo de controladores de tráfego locais interajam, resultando em melhor desempenho do grupo. A ideia principal é que controladores locais geralmente realizam um comportamento reativo, definindo os tempos de verde e vermelho do semáforo, de acordo com informações locais. Esses controladores locais competem de forma a definir qual deles está experienciando a situação mais crítica. O controlador nas piores condições ganha acesso ao workspace global, e depois realiza uma difusão em broadcast de sua condição (e sua localização) para todos os outros controladores, pedindo sua ajuda para lidar com sua situação. Essa chamada do controlador que acessa o workspace global causará uma interferência no comportamento local reativo, para aqueles controladores locais com alguma chance de ajudar o controlador na situação crítica, contendo o tráfego na sua direção. Esse comportamento do grupo, coordenado pela estratégia do workspace global, transforma o comportamento reativo anterior em uma forma de comportamento deliberativo. Nós mostramos que essa estratégia é capaz de melhorar a média do tempo de viagem de todos os veículos que fluem na rede urbana. Um ganho consistente no desempenho foi conseguido com o controlador "Consciência de Máquina" durante todo o tempo da simulação, em diferentes cenários, indo de 10% até maisde 20%, quando comparado ao controlador "Reativo Paralelo" sem o mecanismo de consciência artificial, produzindo evidência para suportar a hipótese de que um mecanismo de consciência artificial, que difunde serialmente em broadcast conteúdo para processos automáticos, pode trazer vantagens para uma tarefa global realizada por uma sociedade de agentes paralelos que operam juntos por uma meta comumAbstract: In this work, we present a distributed cognitive architecture used to control the traffic in an urban network. This architecture relies on a machine consciousness approach - Global Workspace Theory - in order to use competition and broadcast, allowing a group of local traffic controllers to interact, resulting in a better group performance.The main idea is that the local controllers usually perform a purely reactive behavior, defining the times of red and green lights, according just to local information. These local controllers compete in order to define which of them is experiencing the most critical traffic situation. The controller in the worst condition gains access to the global workspace, further broadcasting its condition (and its location) to all other controllers, asking for their help in dealing with its situation. This call from the controller accessing the global workspace will cause an interference in the reactive local behavior, for those local controllers with some chance in helping the controller in a critical condition, by containing traffic in its direction. This group behavior, coordinated by the global workspace strategy, turns the once reactive behavior into a kind of deliberative one. We show that this strategy is capable of improving the overall mean travel time of vehicles flowing through the urban network. A consistent gain in performance with the "Machine Consciousness" traffic signal controller during all simulation time, throughout different simulated scenarios, could be observed, ranging from around 10% to more than 20%, when compared to the "Parallel Reactive" controller without the artificial consciousness mechanism, producing evidence to support the hypothesis that an artificial consciousness mechanism, which serially broadcasts content to automatic processes, can bring advantages to the global task performed by a society of parallel agents working together for a common goalDoutoradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoDoutor em Engenharia Elétrica153206/2010-1CNPQCAPESFAPES

    Planning-based Social Partners for Children with Autism

    Get PDF
    This paper describes the design and implementation of a planning-based socially intelligent agent built to help young children with Autism Spectrum Conditions acquire social communication skills. We explain how planning technology allowed us to satisfy agent’s design requirements that we identified through our consultations with children and carers and through a review of best practices for autism intervention.We discuss the design principles implemented, the engineering challenges faced and the lessons learned from building our pedagogical agent. We conclude by presenting substantial experimental results concerning the agent’s efficacy

    Cognitive performance in old-age depression

    Get PDF
    Study I assessed the influence of depression severity on cognitive performance, while controlling for a range of clinical and demographic factors. Individuals with moderate/severe depression exhibited deficits in multiple cognitive domains, whereas only processing speed was affected in mild depression. Study II examined the influence of combined KIBRA (CC) and CLSTN2 (TT) risk alleles on episodic memory performance. Episodic memory deficits were only observed in individuals with both depression and the disadvantageous CC/TT allelic combination. Study III investigated the role of psychiatric history on cognitive performance in acute and remitted states of depression. Currently depressed individuals with a psychiatric inpatient history and individuals with late-onset depression performed at the lowest levels, whereas cognitive performance in individuals with self-reported recurrent unipolar depression was intermediate. Individuals with remitted unipo lar depression exhibited no cognitive deficits. Physical inactivity, cumulative inpatient days, heart disease burden , and prodromal dementia modulated cognitive p erformance . Study IV assessed cognitive performance in different depression courses (depressed - remitted, remitted-depressed, and nondepressed-late-onset depression ) longitudinally over a maximum period of 6 years. Cognitive decline was observed in all groups for multiple domains, although individuals who changed their status from nondepressed to depressed showed exacerbated cognitive decline. In remitted states, only processing speed and attention were affected. However, these deficits were modulated by benzodiazepine intake. In sum, depression-related cognitive deficits were observed in processing speed, attention, executive function, verbal fluency (Studies I, III, I V), episodic memory (Studies I, II), and semantic memory ( Study I). No depression-related deficits were observed in general knowledge, short-term memory, or spatial ability. As multiple factors were found to modulate cognitive performance in dementia-free unipolar old-age depression, and consistent with the notion that depression is a heterogeneous disorder, this may explain why patterns of cognitive deficits in depression vary between studies. Recurrence rates of depression remain high, and cognitive deficits in depression are associated with a poor prognosis and take a longer time to recover than depressive symptoms. This underscores the importance of early detection of cognitive deterioration in depression. Importantly, cognitive deficits in depression seem largely reversible. Thus, they should be regarded as treatment targets rather than as stable vulnerabilities. Combined profiles of psychiatric history, cognitive performance , and health behaviors may provide important information to individualized treatment
    corecore