Psychodynamic Appraisal Mechanism for Emotional Development through Multi-modal Interaction

This paper focuses on the role of emotion and its synthesis in affective agents facilitating mental development through social interaction. The mechanism of Psychodynamic Cognitive Construction (PCC) is presented, underscoring emotion as physically grounded, dynamically constructed, and personally experienced process. The system using affective appraisal as an intrinsic motivation for autonomous mental development is discussed and implemented on a semi-embodied system, named qViki. The affective incentive makes the system trying to live for its own well-being and improve its constructs of the external world. The fluctuation of tensions, which is induced by innate needs and acquired anticipations, drives associative learning and expressive behaviors. A growing network is devised to memorize and retrieve its past experiences. The experiment shows how the system´s attitude towards certain stimulus is elicited and regulated by interaction, other than pre-defined state-behavior mapping.