Emotion and Embodiment in Cognitive Agents: from Instincts to Music

This paper suggests the use of modeling techniques to tack into the emotion/cognition paradigm. We presented two possible frameworks focusing on the embodiment basis of emotions. The first one explores the emergence of emotion mechanisms, by establishing the primary conditions of survival and exploring the basic roots of emotional systems. These simulations show the emergence of a stable motivational system with emotional contexts resulting from dynamical categorization of objects in the environment, in answer to survival pressures and homeostatic processes. The second framework uses music as a source of information about the mechanism of emotion and we propose a model based on recurrent connectionist architectures for the prediction of emotional states in response to music experience. Results demonstrate that there are strong relationships between arousal reports and music psycho acoustics, such as tempo and dynamics. Finally we discuss future directions of research on emotions based on cognitive agents and mathematical models