Asynchronous learning by emotions and cognition

The existence of emotion and cognition as two interacting systems, both with important roles in decision-making, has been advocated by neurophysiological research (LeDoux, 1998; Damasio, 1994). Following this idea, this paper proposes the ALEC agent architecture which has both emotion and cognition learning capabilities to adapt to real-world environments. These two learning mechanisms embody very different properties which can be related with those of natural emotion and cognitive systems.Experimental results show that both systems contribute positively for the learning performance of the agent.