Motivations, Values and Emotions

[RoboGuy]

University of Memphis researchers Stan Franklin and Uma Ramamurthy havereleased a new paper titled, Motivations,Values and Emotions: Three Sides of the Same Coin (PDF format). Thepaper talks about the interrelationships of the three concepts inautonomous agents, whether they are robots or humans. "Motivationsprime actions, values serve to choose between motivations, emotionsprovide a common currency for values, and emotions implementmotivations." As always, one needs to understand how the researchersuse the terms. In this case, the authors seem to be using the words feelingsand emotions in opposite roles from those I've seen defined in the past.They define feelings as raw sensory inputs such as heat, pain, or thirstand emotions are defined as feeling with cognitive content. Normally, Isee feeling defined as the subjective or phenomenological aspect ofemotion rather than the other way round. Of course,many people still use the two words interchangeably, so anydistinction is helpful. Otherwise,the authors rely on the LIDA (Learning Intelligent Distributed Agent)model of cognition.

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