A Study of Motive Processing

We outline a design based theory of motive processing and attention, including: multiple motivators operating asynchronously, with limited knowledge, processing abilities and time to respond. Attentional mechanisms address these limits using processes diiering in complexity and resource requirements, in order to select which motivators to attend to, how to attend to them, how to achieve those adopted for action and when to do so. A prototype model is under development. Mechanisms include: motivator generators, attention lters, a dispatcher that allocates attention, and a manager. Mechanisms like these might explain the partial loss of control of attention characteristic of many emotional states.