Emotional Congnitive Synthetic Forces

Simulation environments offer a safe, inexpensive alternative to live exercises, but the entities which populate them lack many important human behavioral characteristics such as fear, frustration, anger, and fatigue. Such emotions influence how situations are interpereted, how attention is focused, which actions are considered and selected for execution, and how these actions are executed. The proposed research effort extends human behavioral characteristics to incorporate emotional characteristics into intelligent synthetic forces. Our objective is to transition current research on emotional cognitive architecture into realistic and cognitively plausible simulation applications. The work here is based on existing high fidelity entity level simulations, the Soar cognitive architecture, and recent advances in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. We begin with intelligent, autonormous entity level simulations that have been developed over the past five years in support of DARPA's Synthetic Theater of War program. We will extend the capabilities of these entities by modifying the underlying cognitive architecture with an emotional cognitive architecture being developed at the Information Sciences Institute. BENEFITS: Our primary commercialization objective is to develop high fidelity intelligent entities for use by the U.S. military in training and mission rehersal. Other military applications include: tactice development. strategic planning, and human computer interfaces. Outside of the military domain we anticipate applications fo industrial (training, financial management, human resource management) and entertainment (combat and strategy games).