At one time or another, every one of us has engaged in “wishful thinking,” or “let our hearts influence our heads.” That is, every one of us has felt the effects of our motivations on our thought processes. Given this common everyday experience, it is not surprising that an essential part of early psychological research was the idea that drives, needs, desires, motives, and goals can profoundly...

A metamodel is a relatively small, simple model that approximate the “behavior” of a large, complex model. A common way to develop a metamodel is to generate “data” from a number of largemodel runs and to then use off-the-shelf statistical methods without attempting to understand the model’s internal workings. It is much preferable, in some problems, to improve the quality of such metamodels by...

This poster presents a model for motivated agents with behaviours influenced by an internal, domain independent motivation process rather than domain specific rewards, goals, or examples provided by an external teacher. Internal motivation is desirable in complex, dynamic environments where hard-coded domain theories can only approximate the true state of the world and where pre-programmed goal...