Architectures that tend to focus their attention on a particular activity, such as planning, at a particular moment in time may have some difficulty incorporating external, high priority perceptions into its behavior patterns. An architecture could simply treat the new situation as a standard goal and handle it in the normal course of cognitive processing. But, if the agent's success or survival depends on the timely handling of such a situation, it may be more appropriate to interrupt the current behavior according to the priority of the situation. This may simply involve stopping the current cognitive process in lieu of a more important process. Of course this raises the question of "clean up", that is whether the current process should be stopped immediately or put in a state such that the agent could return to it effectively after dealing with the interrupt.
Return to the Table of Contents