Emotional Concept Development

Paper in proceeding, 2015

Artificial emotions of different varieties have been used for controlling behavior, e.g. in cognitive architectures and reinforcement learning models. We propose to use artificial emotions for a different purpose: controlling concept development. Dynamic networks with mechanisms for adding and removing nodes are more flexible than networks with a fixed topology, but if memories are added whenever a new situation arises, then these networks will soon grow out of proportion. Therefore there is a need for striking a balance that ideally ensures that only the most useful memories will be formed and preserved in the long run. Humans have a tendency to form and preserve memories of situations that are repeated frequently or experienced as emotionally intense (strongly positive or strongly negative), while removing memories that do not meet these criteria. In this paper we present a simple network model with artificial emotions that imitates these mechanisms.