Italian researchers have helped
show that robots can develop basic human emotions such as fear
and use them to respond more efficiently under stress.
The results of the research project, conducted in
co-partnership between Britain and Italy, have been published in
the magazine Plos One.
The scientists studied the evolutionary emergence of
affective behaviours directly from the specific adaptive
problems posed by the ancestral environment in order to develop
a model of the evolution of affective behaviours using simulated
artificial agents equipped with neural networks.
In this way they were able to observe how robots learn to
cope with potentially dangerous situations by choosing to avoid
the risk.
"It is a primordial behaviour associated with fear that
appears automatically in both animals and humans," Orazio
Miglino, director of the Natural and Artificial Cognition (NAC)
laboratory at Federico II University in Naples, told ANSA.
However, "in humans there is also a second phase of
processing to understand what happened. Let's say that our
robots stop at the initial response."
The experiment is one of the first to investigate the
emergence and evolution of emotions in robots and how this can
"effect their performance", Miglino said.
The outcome could help to develop more intelligent robots
because "the emotions are strongly linked to memory, decisions,
motivation and survival", said Daniela Pacella of the NAC and
Plymouth University.
The results have implications for humans as well, since an
artificial neural network that is able to isolate the emotional
circuits from the other cognitive functions can help identify
the areas of the brain implicated in the development of fear.
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