Active mental entities: a new approach to building intelligent autonomous agents

In order to design and realize intelligent autonomous agents, a very active research trend has concentrated its attention on the study of models of mental activity, encompassing the explicit representation of mental attitudes such as beliefs, desires and intentions. In such studies mental attitudes are normally represented as data structures on which a so-called interpreter operates determining the overall agent behavior. In this article we propose an original point of view about mental activity modeling, founded on two basic claims: i) mental attitudes should be regarded as autonomous active entities; ii) an intelligent agent should be conceived as distributed structure, where global behavior is produced by interactions among active mental entities.