Focusing Reasoning Through Emotional Mechanisms

In concrete environments, where uncertainty and dynamism are pervasive and time and resources are limited, reasoning and decision-making processes raise important problems related both to adaptive ability and to the computational complexity of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. In this paper we propose that a symbiotic integration between emotion and cognition is a key aspect to address these problems. To concretize this view we present an agent model where emotion and cognition are modeled as two integrated aspects of intelligent behavior and where affective-emotional mechanisms are used to support adaptability and to focus the reasoning and deliberation mechanisms to cope with their computational complexity.