An architecture for autonomous agency

We present a general architecture for autonomous artificial agents that allows them to cope with the occurrence of internal and external stimuli simultaneously to their ongoing cognitive activities. This new architecture develops general proposals by Simon [1967] and Sloman [1987; 1995] particularized to the model described in [Botelho and Coelho 1995]. We relate the dispute between the primacy of affect and the primacy of cognition to the proposed architecture. Within the mentioned architecture we describe a new mechanism based on emotion and attribution, for controlling attention shift. Automatic as opposed to thoughtful and deliberate decision is a fundamental asset of our approach. Such automaticity is only possible because it draws on properties of the SALT model of memory [Botelho and Coelho 1995]. We relate our proposal to previous work on attention shift [Beaudoin and Sloman 1993], dynamic context-dependent change [Maes 1989] and commitment policies [Pollack and Ringuette 1990] and [Kinny and Georgeff 1991], and show how these former mechanisms may be defined within the proposed architecture. 1 Introduction Attention shift refers to what happens when some agent stops attending to its current thinking and attends to some external or internal event or object.