Exploratory
Project Affect
How does affect shape what we notice, value, remember, and do?
Affect helps regulate what people notice, value, remember, and do. Project Affect investigates these regulatory functions and asks how their influence could be specified, tested, and reconstructed in artificial systems.
Working scope
Emotion and affect as regulatory mechanisms of cognition: shaping attention, salience, valuation, memory, motivation, risk perception, and action selection.
The target is measurable synthetic regulation. Emotional self-description does not establish regulation, biological equivalence, or subjective feeling. A first regulatory target and execution priority remain unresolved.
Regulation that changes cognition
Illustrative scenario · Not an executed experiment or adopted protocol
Consider two artificial systems with access to the same information. One allocates more attention to uncertain hazards; the other prioritizes a potential reward. If their decisions differ, the investigation would ask which regulatory policy caused the difference and how changing that policy changes behavior.
For frontier AI, describing an emotion and using affective language are readily observable outputs; a regulatory mechanism requires a different account. It must be specified, measured, and perturbed, with consequences for attention, valuation, memory, motivation, risk perception, or action selection. This illustration does not establish an affective mechanism, subjective feeling, or correspondence with human affect.
Explore another capability in Project FictionWhat comes next
- Select a regulatory function and observable measures.
- Specify a manipulable mechanism and controls for wording, reward, and extra computation.
- Define failure criteria and the next research decision.
Research direction · Not an approved experiment
Research records
The repository records conceptual and foundational work. No Affect implementation, dataset, executed experiment, or empirical result is established here. There is no paper or runnable artifact listed for this program yet.