Modeling motivational representations

As often remarked, the cognitive revolution of the 1960s favored the decline of motivational theories. The rising cognitive science in fact displayed a certain disinterest for both motivational and emotional constructs. However in the last decades this general picture has rapidly changed. The modelling of motivational representations and their integration in a cognitive architecture is now a topic of crucial interest to cognitive science. In time, goals are taking more and more the hot heritage of motivational theories. Both artificial intelligence and cognitive and social psychology are paying special attention to the relationships among cognition, motivation, and emotion. However, the well known tendency of cognitive approaches to fragmentation into narrow and isolated sub-disciplines is still alive and well. An integrative and bridge-building work is needed to counteract the tendency to fragmentation. The tendency to start from scratch, typical in the engineering community, implies obvious risks: not only the waste of "reinventing the wheel", but also the likely roughness and groundlessness of the resulting models and implementations. However, also behavioral models are often too narrow, ill-defined, and hardly translatable into architectural terms. This is the second kind of integration needed: to translate existing models of the interrelations among motivational-emotional and rational-decisional aspects of the mind into operational and architectural models.