The empathon: Towards a computational agent mimicking empathy
Résumé
This paper investigates a basic model simulating empathy. The model is abstracted from recent advances in neurobiology, such as the discovery of mirror neurons or of neurons coding for both visual recognition and connected action plans. In a very simplified computational environment, we define agents which associate action plans with visual stimuli, and are also able to feel such action plans when they observe another agent in a similar situation. We propose a first set of experiments involving only a pair of agents, with different action abilities.