Surprise as Shortcut for Anticipation: Clustering Mental States in Reasoning

Michele Piunti, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Rino Falcone

To enhance effectiveness in real world applications, autonomous agents have to develop cognitive competences: we refer to anticipatory capabilities, pointing out their strong liaison with the functional role of emotional mental states as those of human-like metaphor: not only the root element for both surprise and anticipation are expectations, but also part of the effects of the former elicit efforts on the latter. We provide a general architecture enhancing practical reasoning with mental states, describing and empirically evaluating how mental and behavioral attitudes, emerging from mental states, can be applied for augmenting agent reactivity, opportunism and the efficacy in anticipatory competences.

URL: Surprise as shortcut for Anticipation: clustering Mental States in Reasoning