Emotional Attention in Autonomous Agents: A Biologically Inspired Model

Attention and emotions are two major functions underlying human behavior. Evidence shows that these two processes interact extensively in the human brain. In fields such as human-computer interactions and artificial intelligence, computational models of attention and emotions have been developed to be included in cognitive agent architectures. However, these have been implemented as two separated processes. Although this strategy has allowed the development of intelligent agents capable of showing very believable behavior, the modeling of the interactions between the attention and emotion processes has been widely ignored. In this paper, we propose a biologically inspired computational model of emotional attention. This model is designed to provide intelligent agents with adequate mechanisms to attend and react to emotionally salient elements in the environment. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed model helps increase the believability of virtual agent's behaviors.