Theory of mind requires an understanding of both desires and beliefs. Moreover, children understand desires before beliefs. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this developmental lag. Additionally, previous neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies have neglected the direct comparison of these developmentally critical mental-state concepts. Event-related brain potentials were reco...

The development of formal models for rational agents is mainly driven by the well-established BDI approach which divides an agent’s mental state into beliefs, desires, and intentions. In this paper, we argue that motivation as well has to be taken into account in order to allow for a flexible and proactive behavior of intelligent agents in unreliable environments. In our approach, motives take ...

This investigation examined the roles of gender and desires for independence and dependence in the support process. We assessed 118 older adults who reported needing help with at least 1 activity of daily living as a result of illness or health problems. Men with a high desire to be independent responded negatively to receiving support from their social network. Women's outcomes were generally ...

According to advocates of internalism about reasons for action, there is an interesting connection between an agent’s reasons and the agent’s present desires. On the simplest version of this view, an agent has a reason to act a certain way at some time if and only if acting that way would promote his present desires. Let us call this the sub-Humean model.1 The sub-Humean model is widely regarde...

In this paper we introduce and study a logic of desires. The semantics of our logic is defined by means of two ordering relations representing preference and normality as in Boutilier’s logic QDT. However, the desires are interpreted in a different way: “in context A, I desire B” is interpreted as “the best among the most normal A∧B worlds are preferred to the most normal A ∧ ¬B worlds”. We stu...

There is one multi agent class that can be viewed as a society where the normative system guides the agents to achieve the system goals. When an agent perceives a normative system, it needs to reason about the norms impact on its desires. Considering that the agent’s resources are limited, it is necessary to reason about the resources available and if they are enough to achieve a desire or norm...

Modelling real world problems using rational agents has been heavily investigated over the past two decades. BDI (Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions) Logic has been widely used to represent and reason about rational agency. However, in the real world, we often have to deal with different levels of confidence in the beliefs we hold, desires we have, and intentions that we commit to. This paper pro...