MEDiTATe: a First Step of a Journey from BDI to Neuroscience, and Back

The connections between neuroscience findings and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are very strong, but literature that analyzes how neuroscience inspired AI, and viceversa, mainly takes a machine learning point of view. However, intelligent software agents modeled after the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture have many ties with neuroscience. Some are explicitly expressed, others are less evident and deserve to be better addressed and understood. In order to explore such ties and make their hidden potential exploitable, we introduce the BDI-inspired MEDiTATe conceptual framework encompassing theory of Mind, Emotions, Deep TAlk, and small Talk. MEDiTATe is intended as a principled means to analyze the connections between neuroscience and BDI approaches in a systematic way, and to interact with neuro-scientists by sharing a common terminological ground. The main contribution of this paper is indeed to survey the relevant scientific literature and organize the findings of this review coherently with the MEDiTATe vision. Nonetheless, most modules of MEDiTATe have been, or may be, implemented using a well known toolkit for BDI agents, Jason. In this sense, the possibility to move MEDiTATe from the conceptual level to the practical one is backed up by existing software tools. Targeting Jason and its JaCaMo extension only is a limitation of the current MEDiTATe approach, but it is the limitation that makes a shift from theory to practice feasible. MEDiTATe features small talk and deep talk that we conjecture to be related but distinct cognitive functions, each with its own purpose and possibly dedicated different brain areas. We expect that MEDiTATe – once fully developed in a practical Jason-based toolkit – may support the study of these functions and of their relations with other, better understood, cognitive processes, possibly inspiring experiments by neuro-scientists to validate the hypothesis. In fact, in our long-term vision, MEDiTATe should offer to computer scientists and neuro-scientists a shared gym for experimenting models and theories of brain functioning.