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From: nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle)
Subject: Re: Emotional computers
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Date: Thu, 16 Jan 1997 19:17:04 GMT
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gregs@umich.edu (Greg Stevens) writes:
>It may interest you to contrast the role of emotion in cognitive activity
>as outlined by Frijda (I'm thinking specifically of his 1986 review
>book and theory) with the role of that relationship as understood by
>Schore (1994 "Affect Regulation and the Origin of Self").  Schore
>begins from a developmental and clinical perspective, and when *he*
>looks at the neurophysiological data it makes as much sense to speak
>of cognition as emerging out of basic emotional activity, rather
>than emotional activity interrupting/interfering with/augmenting
>cognitive activity.  

    Could I have a full cite on this, please.  This looks interesting.

>:  > Physiologically, these kinds of information are embodied
>:  > differently.  The experience of fear depends, at least in part,
>:  > on systemic hormonal and neurochemical regulatory changes
>:  > and changes in levels of specific neurochemicals in different
>:  > areas.  These are mediated by patterns of electrochemical
>:  > neural firing, but without the hormonal and neurochemical
>:  > changes there is no experience of "fear."  On the other hand,
>:  > cognitive activity seems likely to depend primarily on
>:  > patterns of electrochemical firing (in cortical areas, esp.),
>:  > and not on specific *systemic* changes in neurochemical or
>:  > hormonal levels.

    Fear can be though of as spatial; i.e. it's worth modelling fear
as coming from a direction.  This leads to a control system that can
drive the flight reflex.  You can have fear maps, do hill-climbing,
get caught in local minima ("paralyzed by fear"), inject noise to
get out of local minima ("panic"), and so forth.  I can't say if this
is physiologically realistic, but you can build a control system this way
and get reasonable results.   I wrote some simple programs to illustrate
this a few years ago, and little circles can be made to move around 
in a 2D world in a plausible way.  It's not clear whether this is
an interesting result or just anthromorphizing a path-planning algorithm,
though.

    It's hard to see how neurotransmitters alone could provide the 
level of control needed to make animals run away from danger, as opposed
to just running randomly.

    					John Nagle
