Varieties of Affect and the CogAff Architecture Schema

In the last decade and a half, the amount of work on affect in general and emotion in particular has grown, in empirical psychology, cognitive science and AI, both for scientific purposes and for the purpose of designing synthetic characters, e.g. in games and entertainments. Such work understandably starts from concepts of ordinary language (e.g. “emotion”, “feeling”, “mood”, etc.). However, these concepts can be deceptive: the words appear to have clear meanings but are used in very imprecise and systematically ambiguous ways. This is often because of explicit or implicit pre-scientific theories about mental states and process. More sophisticated theories can provide a basis for deeper and more precise concepts, as has happened in physics and chemistry. In the Cognition and Affect project we have been attempting to explore the benefits of developing architecture-based concepts, i.e. starting with specifications of architectures for complete agents and then finding out what sorts of states and processes are supported by those architectures. So, instead of presupposing one theory of the architecture and explicitly or implicitly basing concepts on that, we define a space of architectures generated by the CogAff architecture schema, where each supports different collections of concepts. In that space we focus on one architecture H-Cogaff, a particularly rich instance of the CogAff architecture schema, conjectured as a theory of normal adult human information processing. The architecture-based concepts that it supports provide a framework for defining with greater precision than previously a host of mental concepts, including affective concepts. We then find that these map more or less loosely onto various pre-theoretical concepts, such as “emotion”, etc. We indicate some of the variety of emotion concepts generated by the H-Cogaff architecture A different architecture, supporting a different range of mental concepts might be appropriate for exploring affective states of other animals, for instance insects, reptiles, or other mammals, and young children.