Focused Behavior and Processing/Selective Attention in Atlantis

Focused Behavior and Processing/Selective Attention in Atlantis

ATLANTIS enforces continuity of attention by the integration of the sequencing and deliberative layers with the control layer. The sequencing layer is responsible for deciding when an agent should continue to work on its current task or interrupt it for a new task. It can terminate a primitive task being carried out by the control layer in response to an interruption.

Additionally, when terminating a task, a clean-up procedure may be executed to free up resources used by that task. This ability is a partial solution to the "Wesson Oil Problem": the problem of interrupting a task and leaving it in a dangerous or unnecessarily inconvenient state, when a little more effort can be used to put the task in a better dormant state. The task queue can hold multiple tasks, several of which can be enabled simultaneously. So an interruption would result in: the clean-up and disabling of the interrupted task; the introduction and enabling of the new task into the task queue; and then perhaps re-enabling of the suspended task sometime in the future. ATLANTIS supports cleanup, and also allows cleanup to be ignored or interrupted if an event or observation is sufficiently important.


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