From Knowing to Feeling

Abstract

Visual and auditory processes represent sensory information, but do not evaluate its importance for survival or success. Interactions between perceptual/cognitive and evaluative reinforcement/emotional/motivational mechanisms accomplish this. Cognitive-emotional resonances support conscious feelings, knowing their source, and controlling motivation and responses to acquire valued goals. Also explained is how emotions may affect behavior without being conscious, and how learning adaptively times actions to achieve desired goals. Breakdowns in cognitive-emotional resonances can cause symptoms of mental disorders such as depression, autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD, including explanations of how affective meanings fail to organize behavior when this happens. Historic trends in the understanding of cognition and emotion are summarized, including work of Chomsky and Skinner. Brain circuits of conditioned reinforcer learning and incentive motivational learning are modeled, including the inverted-U in conditioning as a function of interstimulus interval, secondary conditioning, and attentional blocking and unblocking. How humans and animals act as minimal adaptive predictors is explained using the CogEM model’s interactions between sensory cortices, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex. Cognitive-emotional properties solve phylogenetically ancient Synchronization and Persistence Problems using circuits that are conserved between mollusks and humans. Avalanche command circuits for learning arbitrary sequences of sensory-motor acts, dating back to crustacea, increase their sensitivity to environmental feedback as they morph over phylogeny into mammalian cognitive and emotional circuits. Antagonistic rebounds drive affective extinction. READ circuits model how life-long learning occurs without associative saturation or passive forgetting. Affective memories of opponent emotions like fear vs. relief can then persist until they are disconfirmed by environmental feedback.