Abstract
How experienced emotional states, induced by the events that emerge in our context, influence our behaviour? Are they an obstacle or a helpful assistant for our reasoning process? Antonio Damasio gave exhaustive answers to these questions through his studies on patients with brain injuries. He demonstrated how the emotions guide decision-making and he has identified a region of the brain which has a fundamental role in this process. Antoine Bechara devised a test to validate the proper functioning of that cortical region of the brain. Inspired from Damasio’s theories we developed a mechanism in an artificial agent that enables it to represent emotional states and to exploit them for biasing its decisions. We also implement the card gambling task that Bechara used on his patients as a validating test. Finally we put our artificial agent through this test for 100 trials. The results of this experiment are analysed and discussed highlighting the demonstrated efficiency of the implemented somatic marker mechanism and the potential impact of this system in the field of social robotics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., Damasio, A.: Deciding conservatively before knowing the conservative strategy. Science 275, 1293–1294 (1997)
Bechara, A., Damasio, A.R., Damasio, H., Anderson, S.W.: Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex. Cognition 50(1), 7–15 (1994)
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Damasio, A.R., Lee, G.P.: Different contributions of the human amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex to decision-making. The Journal of Neuroscience 19(13), 5473–5481 (1999)
Bechara, A., Damasio, H., Tranel, D., Damasio, A.R.: Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy. Science 275(5304), 1293–1295 (1997)
Bechara, A., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., Damasio, A.R.: Failure to respond autonomically to anticipated future outcomes following damage to prefrontal cortex. Cerebral cortex 6(2), 215–225 (1996)
Borst, C.V.: The Mind-Brain Identity Theory: A Collection of Papers. St Martin’s P., New York (1970)
Breazeal, C., Velasquez, J.: Robot in society: friend or appliance. In: Proceedings of the 1999 Autonomous Agents Workshop on Emotion-Based Agent Architectures, pp. 18–26 (1999)
Damasio, A.: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Grosset/Putnam, New York (1994)
Damasio, A.R., Tranel, D., Damasio, H.: Somatic markers and the guidance of behavior: Theory and preliminary testing. Frontal Lobe Function and Dysfunction, 217–229 (1991)
Gadanho, S., Hallam, J.: Emotion triggered learning for autonomous robots. DAI Research Paper (1998)
Giarratano, J.C., Riley, G.D.: Expert Systems: Principles and Programming. Brooks/Cole Publishing Co., Pacific Grove (2005)
Gray, E.K., Watson, D., Payne, R., Cooper, C.: Emotion, mood, and temperament: Similarities, differences, and a synthesis. Emotions at work: Theory, research and applications for management, 21–43 (2001)
Kiverstein, J., Miller, M.: The embodied brain: towards a radical embodied cognitive neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, 237 (2015)
Mazzei, D., Billeci, L., Armato, A., Lazzeri, N., Cisternino, A., Pioggia, G., Igliozzi, R., Muratori, F., Ahluwalia, A., De Rossi, D.: The face of autism. In: The 19th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2010, pp. 791–796. IEEE Computer Society publisher (2010)
Mazzei, D., Cominelli, L., Lazzeri, N., Zaraki, A., De Rossi, D.: I-CLIPS brain: a hybrid cognitive system for social robots. In: Duff, A., Lepora, N.F., Mura, A., Prescott, T.J., Verschure, P.F.M.J. (eds.) Living Machines 2014. LNCS, vol. 8608, pp. 213–224. Springer, Heidelberg (2014)
Pally, R.: Emotional processing: The mind-body connection. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1998)
Russell, J.A.: The circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39, 1161–1178 (1980)
Suzuki, A., Hirota, A., Takasawa, N., Shigemasu, K.: Application of the somatic marker hypothesis to individual differences in decision making. Biological Psychology 65(1), 81–88 (2003)
Velasquez, J.: Modeling emotion-based decision-making. Emotional and intelligent: The tangled knot of cognition, 164–169 (1998)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cominelli, L., Mazzei, D., Pieroni, M., Zaraki, A., Garofalo, R., De Rossi, D. (2015). Damasio’s Somatic Marker for Social Robotics: Preliminary Implementation and Test. In: Wilson, S., Verschure, P., Mura, A., Prescott, T. (eds) Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems. Living Machines 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9222. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22979-9_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22979-9_31
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22978-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22979-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)