Emotional advantage for adaptability and autonomy

During the last two decades, researchers have collected a decisive amount of experimental evidence about the fundamental role of Emotion on cognitive processing. Emotional phenomena have been correlated with effective decision-making processes, memory, learning and other high-level cognitive capabilities and skills (e.g. risk assessment). In this paper we will describe an ongoing work that aims to design new Agent Architectures influenced by what has been learned in psychology and neurosciences about Emotion-cognition interaction. We will present an Agent architecture that includes several emotional-like mechanisms, namely: emotional evaluation functions, Emotion-biased processing, emotional tagging and mood congruent memory. These mechanisms are intended to increase the performance and adaptability of Agents operating in real-time environments. We will also introduce Pyrosim, a MAS platform we have developed to serve as an appropriate test-bed for Emotional-based Architectures, which simulates a forest fire in a complex 3D environment.