The PAC Cognitive Architecture

Abstract

The PAC (personality, affect, and cognition) Architecture is a new modeling architecture designed to create Intelligent Virtual Agents with spe cific personality traits, emotions, and cultural characteristics. PAC integrates theory and data from personality and social psychology, cognitive sci ence, and neuroscience to build a model of personality, emotion, and culture based on fundamental underlying human motivational systems (e.g., dominance, coalition formation, affectional relationships, self-protection, mate choice, parenting, and attachment). These motives are activated by situational cues, but individual agents can have differing baseline activations for different motives. Motives are controlled through a hierarchy of control processes (e.g., Approach and Avoidance systems, Disinhibition/Constraint system) that can be differentially set to capture individual differences. In PAC, the activation dynamics of underlying motives influence both the way in which another agent’s behavior is interpreted and the target agent’s choice of actions. Thus, the motive dynamics give rise to persistent individual behavioral tendencies, that is, differences in personality.