Personality and Agents: Formalising State and Effects

Personality is one of the central elements determining the behaviour of humans. It influences other cognitive mechanisms such as emotions and moods and thus effects attention and actions. However, in the literature about cognitive agents, work that investigates the effects of personality is rare and somewhat disconnected. Bridging this gap represents one step towards conceptualising human behaviour in software agents, e.g. for resource-bounded agents in highly-dynamic environments or for virtual humans with realistic behaviour. The integration of personality in agents also requires its integration into reasoning processes used in agent-based systems. In this paper, we propose a formalisation that enables reasoning about the effectsand state of personality. This formalisation is integrated into the ‘\(\mathcal {L}\)ogic \(\mathcal {O}\)f \(\mathcal {R}\)ational \(\mathcal {A}\)gents’ (\(\mathcal {LORA}\)) and is the foundation for reasoning about the personality of other agents and the influence of personality on the action selection process.