Scientific record
Project Affect
Canonical research definition
Project Affect studies emotion and affect as regulatory mechanisms of cognition—how they shape attention, salience, valuation, memory, motivation, risk perception, and action selection—and attempts to reproduce those functions in artificial cognitive systems.
The target is synthetic affective mechanisms. The question is what computational role affect plays and what changes when that role is deliberately instantiated or perturbed. Affect, cognition, and motivation are interacting subsystems; this does not settle a universal emotion taxonomy.
Emotional self-description alone is anthropomorphic theater, not evidence of regulation or subjective feeling. A future mechanism requires operational measures, manipulable variables, alternatives, controls, failure criteria, and a next decision. No model, dataset, approved experiment, or result is established by this definition.
Unresolved questions
Which regulatory function should be isolated first? How can its effect be distinguished from prompt wording, explicit reward/incentive changes, extra resources, or style? What would support a claim about human cognition from an artificial regulatory effect? Which interactions with memory, Fiction, Imagination, or Daydream deserve testing after individual functions are characterized?
Read research status, Hermes Method, project map (not included in this public selection: ../../lab/project-registry.md), and open questions (not included in this public selection: ../../lab/open-questions-and-next-experiments.md). Affect has no selected execution priority over existing programs.
Source: discussion S36–S39 (not included in this public selection: ../../docs/handovers/2026-10-14-hermes-discussion-source.md#s36); user named Project Affect in S37. Prior art supports an established surrounding field, not a Hermes result.