Psi-theory

Psi-theory, developed by Dietrich Dörner at the University of Bamberg, is a systemic psychological theory covering human action regulation, intention selection and emotion.

[1][2] It models the human mind as an information processing agent, controlled by a set of basic physiological, social and cognitive drives.

Perceptual and cognitive processing are directed and modulated by these drives, which allow the autonomous establishment and pursuit of goals in an open environment.

Next to the motivational and emotional system, Psi-theory suggests a neuro-symbolic model of representation, which encodes semantic relationships in a hierarchical spreading activation network.

[3] Psi-theory describes a cognitive system as a structure consisting of relationships and dependencies that is designed to maintain a homeostatic balance in the face of a dynamic environment.

Psi-theory suggests hierarchical networks of nodes as a universal mode of representation for declarative, procedural and tacit knowledge.

Plans, episodes, situations and objects are described with a semantic network formalism that relies on a fixed number of pre-defined link types, which especially encode causal/sequential ordering, and partonomic hierarchies (the theory specifies four basic link-types).

Special nodes (representing neural circuits) control the spread of activation and the forming of temporary or permanent associations and their dissociations.At any time, the Psi agent possesses a world model (situation image).

Hypothesis based perception ("HyPercept") is understood as a bottom-up (data-driven and context-dependent) cuing of hypotheses that is interleaved with a top-down verification.

The phenomenological qualities of emotion are due to the effect of modulatory settings on perception and cognitive functioning (i.e. the perception yields different representations of memory, self and environment depending on the modulation), and to the experience of accompanying physical sensations that result from the effects of the particular modulator settings on the physiology of the system (for instance, by changing the muscular tension, the digestive functions, blood pressure and so on).

Abstractions may be learned by evaluating and reorganizing episodic and declarative descriptions to generalize and fill in missing interpretations (this facilitates the organization of knowledge according to conceptual frames and scripts).

Problem solving is context dependent (contextual priming is served by associative pre-activation of mental content) and subject to modulation.

Where quantitative statements are made, for instance about the rate of decay of the associations in episodic memory, the width and depth of activation spreading during memory retrieval, these statements are rarely supported by experimental evidence; they represent ad hoc solutions to engineering requirements posed by the design of a problem solving and learning agent.

A partial exception to this rule is the emotional model, which has been tested as a set of computational simulation experiments.

MicroPsi's first generation (2003–2009) is implemented in Java, and includes a framework for editing and simulating software agents using spreading activation networks, and a graphics engine for visualization.