Learning Courses of Action Using the “Movie-in-the-Brain” Paradigm

Contents

To exhibit social competence, an agent ought to possess the ability of deciding adequate courses of action when confronted with other agents. In this decisionmaking process the agent has to evaluate the behavior of other agents (and objects) along time in response its actions and to act in order to raise the desirability of the resulting situation. To achieve this desideratum, the acting agent should learn causal relationships associating its actions to the responses got from the environment. In this paper the concept of "movie-inthe- brain" (MITB) mentioned by Damsio (Damsio 1999) was applied to the development and the implementation of a mechanism capable of establishing such causal relationships. A very simple example of an agent supervising a controller of an inverted pendulum illustrates the application of the MITB paradigm as a way of learning cause-effect relations and of improving the competence of the agent along time. Some interesting preliminary results are presented and discussed.