The Other Half of the Embodied Mind
Frontiers in Psychology 2011 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00069 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 37 |
| Key points | Proposes that emotional states can be modeled in robots as states of a neural sub-network that speeds up and improves motivational decisions, and argues that such models can yield less ambiguous theories of mind and predictions, with extensions to social emotions and genuinely felt expressions. |
Abstract
Embodied theories of mind tend to be theories of the cognitive half of the mind and to ignore its emotional half while a complete theory of the mind should account for both halves. Robots are a new way of expressing theories of the mind which are less ambiguous and more capable to generate specific and non-controversial predictions than verbally expressed theories. We outline a simple robotic model of emotional states as states of a sub-part of the neural network controlling the robot's behavior which has specific properties and which allows the robot to make faster and more correct motivational decisions, and we describe possible extensions of the model to account for social emotional states and for the expression of emotions that, unlike those of current "emotional" robots, are really "felt" by the robot in that they play a well-identified functional role in the robot's behavior.