Anticipation and Emotions for Goal Directed Agents

A substantial part of this work is devoted to define goal directed architectures enabling anticipation through emotion and expectation processing. An ontology of anticipatory mental states (e.g., predictions, expectations, etc.) is provided to clarify what cognitive anticipation exactly is. Focusing on goal directed systems, we will mainly deal with cognitive expectations and their related emotions such as surprise, disappointment and relief. In particular, we will focus on mismatch-based emotions, discussing their pivotal role in learning, attention, belief revision and action execution.