Simple Human Emotions Modeling Oriented to Human

Learning: A Brain Computer Simulation

Sergio Ledesma, University of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico
Jose Ruiz Pinales, University of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico
Ma Guadalupe Garcia, University of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico
Francisco Elizalde, University of Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico

Abstract: The human brain receives input from internal and external sources. Internal sources include
body signaling like hunger, cold, need for urination, etc. On the other hand, external sources include
conversations with other students (or family members), school related activities, surrounding objects,
etc. Students tend to process these inputs using several scheduling algorithms. Emotions play an im-
portant role in how humans interact with others and their environment. As emotions provide clear in-
formation about how likely a task will be completed before it loses its activation, a scheduling algorithm
based on emotions is proposed. Because the level of activation of a thought decreases with time, and
because humans may forget to complete a task if the level of activation is low, it is important to switch
among several tasks to keep their activations high. Clearly, when a student is working on a specific
assignment, the activation of it rises. However, this processing will activate other regions of memory,
and forgotten uncompleted assignments may gain enough activation. Computer simulations are used
to demonstrate how students tend to keep their emotions positive. Finally, it is concluded that human
learning can be improved if one specific case of study is used in several courses. In this situation, the
student learns specific information that is being used simultaneously in several courses. This has the
advantage of helping the students to keep the matter of the current case of study active. As the proposed
model includes human emotions in the learning process, the simulations show how the student may
feel good or bad while experiencing school activities.

Keywords: Emotions, Learning, Computer Simulation

Introduction

H
UMAN EMOTIONS PLAY an important role in human behavior and brain pro-
cessing. Multiple input signals get into the brain asking for attention. These signals
may be originated by internal or external sources, and the brain is responsible for
processing them. Some of these signals may be processed immediately; others may
be stored for future processing. But at every moment the brain may review the content of
these signals and decide what action has to be taken. Some of this processing is conscious,
and part of it, is unconscious. In any case, the brain is organizing and matching these signals
to activate other areas (regions) of memory, see [5], [7]. This brilliant flow of signals and
reactions will be modeled in a simple way to show how the human brain is trying to keep
an emotional balance during its normal operation. Computer simulations, using the proposed
model, will show how students experience more negative emotions when their assignments
include a vast range of topics than when their assignments include only a few themes. Current

Ubiquitous Learning: An International Journal

Volume 3, Number 2, 2011, http://ijq.cgpublisher.com/, ISSN 1835-9795
© Common Ground, Sergio Ledesma, Jose Ruiz Pinales, Ma Guadalupe Garcia, Francisco Elizalde, All
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UBIQUITOUS LEARNING: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

research (where emotions have been considered for learning and motivation) can be found
in [1], [4], [8], [9].
This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, background information about activation
and emotions is reviewed. In Section 3, a simple method to model human brain task
scheduling is presented. In Section 4, experiments are performed to monitor students’ emo-
tions when changing the number of themes simultaneously taught during a period of time
at a computer simulated educational institution. Finally, Section 5 presents some conclusions
about the proposed method and its implications in curricula design.

Background Information
The brain is made out of small units of processing known as neurons. Artificial neural net-
works (ANNs) are used to solve difficult problems for humans [10], [16], [18]. ANNs learn
and extract information from a data set, see [12], [13], [14]. On the other hand, the approach
used in this paper tries to model brain behavior using emotions as a native variable that
provides information about processing completion.
An input signal is defined as a set of topics and actions that represent a thought or a school
assignment. This paper focuses only on simple input signals which comprise one action and
one topic. For example, if a student is assigned to write an essay about dolphins, the input
signal will be “ write about dolphins”; where the action will be “write about” and the topic
will be “dolphins”. In general, each assignment implies a finite amount of processing or
work denoted by wi . So, if there are N assignments with their respective associated amount
of work, the total amount of work that has to be done by the student is

where each value wi is normalized in the range from 0 to 1. A value of zero means no work;
a value close to 1 represents a very difficult homework assignment requiring a lot of pro-
cessing and time.

Activation
At any point in time and space, the human brain deals with many thoughts. Specifically, the
student may be thinking about home, school, money, sports, etc. There are, however, few
thoughts that are active. That is, some of his thoughts are dormant and can not become active
by themselves; they need an external or internal source of activation. Specifically, any current
skill or topic that is being used in the classroom or at home by the student is considered
active. Thus, the level of activation, denoted by a, may be represented by a real number; a
small value of a means little activation; a big value means high activation. However, a nor-
malized value in the range from 0 to 1 has some nice properties, and it is easy to understand.
Thus, an assignment with a = 0 has no activation, and it has no chance of being processed
by the student. On the other hand, when a student is currently working on a specific assign-
ment, it is active and a increases by some amount every unit of time. In other words, when
a student is constantly processing information about a specific topic, the associated activation
of the current topic will be high. Without losing generality, it will be assumed that any new

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assignment will have a = 1; that is, the student is fully motivated by the freshness of this
new idea and, as a result, the associated topic and action (skill) will be fully active.

Decline of Activation
When a student is working on a specific assignment, all of his other unrelated assignments
will lose activation. Particularly, after a student has learned something at school, he will
start losing this specific skill if he does not regularly use it. There are many ways to model
how an idea loses its activation; here it will be assumed that the activation of the idea de-
creases exponentially. Clearly more research is required to establish a precise model. For
the sake of simplicity, it will be assumed that the brain processing is sampled uniformly and
the activation level can be represented by a sequence as

where n is the time, and k is a positive constant that is less than one. Note that a continuous
time model can also be used. When a student has a k close to 0, the activation level decreases
slowly with time, and he usually has more opportunity to complete a task. On the other hand,
when a student has a k that is close to 1, the activation level goes to zero quickly, and he
may easily forget uncompleted tasks; this will result in a strong negative emotion. The constant
k should be adjusted to match the student brain’s physical condition. Specifically, a student
with k close to 0 learns in the classroom and spends little time studying at home. For this
kind of student, their levels of stress are low. In contrast, a student with k close to 1 will
easily forget his assignments and will never complete them, leading to stress; he will know
that he did not complete all his tasks, but he will not know what these are. He may also forget
that he is stressed; however, others will remind him of his situation. He may also feel uncom-
fortable when compared with others. The students in this category require taking notes,
lengthy professor explanations and spend several hours outside the classroom studying and
reviewing the material covered in class.

Rise of Activation
As was mentioned earlier, the level of activation decreases with time if no brain processing
is performed on a specific task, that is

where

When k is close to 0 (but greater than 0), the activation level increases slowly with time, re-
quiring a very long time to fully activate a dormant task. On the other hand, when k is close

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to 1, the task activation may increase quickly. This increase in activation ensures that there
will be enough time to complete the task. Note that any increase in the activation will give
some kind of relief to the student as the associated emotion may become positive; this will
be explained next. Figure 1 shows the behavior of equation (2) and (3). This figure illustrates
the activation level as a function of time. During the first 100 units of time, assume that the
student is learning and applying a specific concept. Therefore, the associated activation will
rise until it reaches a maximum value of 1. After that, the student keeps on using this
knowledge and the activation will remain constant with a value of 1. When the time arrives
at 150 the semester is over; if the student stops using what he learned, the activation will
decrease as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Rise and Decline of Activation for k=0.05

Emotions
There are many ways to define an emotion, see [4]. Unfortunately, current research has not
focused on quantifying an emotion. From a practical point of view, defining an emotion as
a number allows plugging an emotion into an equation, and being able to get results based
on it. Even though each person experiences his emotions differently, it is possible to divide
the emotions into three categories: positive, negative and neutral (no emotion). There are,
of course, many other emotions in between these three levels.
A task emotion ei may be defined as the task activation minus the associated task work,
specifically

Because the values of ai and wi are normalized in the range from 0 to 1, the resulting emotion
ei is in the range from -1 to 1. Thus, when an emotion is close to 1, it means that there is
plenty of activation remaining and little work or processing to be done on this assignment;
the student will experience a clear and positive emotion. On the other hand, when the emotion
is close to -1, it means that there is still plenty of work to be done, and little or no activation.
Under these conditions, the task may become dormant without ever being processed or
completed; this of course will result in a negative feeling. Finally, when the emotion is 0, it

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means than the activation level and the work to be done are balanced, everything will work
out just fine; the student will experience neither excitement nor negative emotions.

Proposed Method
Consider a task list to store the inputs that will flow into the student brain, you may think of
this list as a list of school assignments. In real life, the student may also receive input from
other sources. Suppose that each item in this list includes only one topic and one action.
Suppose also, that the time n is a discrete variable, and the student completes a constant
amount of work per unit of time denoted by p w. Note that this amount of work may include
the filing of an input or the processing of an incomplete assignment that was previously
given. Figure 2 shows a simple task list with four assignments. The first item on this list is
“read about finance”; the second item is “solve math problems” and so on with a total amount
of work of 2. For the sake of simplicity, suppose that the student brain has two sets for
storing the items coming from the task list: the action set and the topic set. When an item
is removed from the task list, the task action is added to the action set, and the task topic is
added to the topic set, see Figure 3. Because actions and topics are stored in sets, there is
not any implicit order among the elements in the set. Thus, two objects or two topics that
are adjacent to each other in the grid do not hold any specific relationship. The top row of
Figure 3 shows a topic set. The leftmost column of Figure 3 shows an action set. At each
unit of time, one item is removed from the task list and assigned to the student. He then
processes or files this input using a 2-D array called the action-topic grid, like the one shown
in Figure 3. The advantage of using a grid for the student memory structure is that it allows
the activation to flow vertically and horizontally. In real life, activation flow occurs in brain
areas or regions; see [2], [7], [11], [13]. Generally speaking, each brain area specializes in
a specific human skill or method of processing data.

Figure 2: A Simple Task List

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Figure 3: Processing the Task List

Figure 3 illustrates three tasks: “write about the atom”, “read about computers”, and “study
plants”. Consider the task “read about computers”. For this specific case, the action is “read
about”, the topic is “computers”, and this task is represented by the cell located at the inter-
section of the respective action and topic. Inside this cell, there are two bars: the first bar (of
medium size) indicates the level of activation, and the second tiny bar in the cell indicates
the amount of work wi. When “ read about computers ” is removed from the task list for
processing, the student may decide to stop whatever he is doing and perform all the required
actions to read about computers, or he can just store the request for further processing if he
is currently processing a very demanding task. Thus, each pending task is represented by a
cell with two bars in it.
As each assignment corresponds to one cell in the action-topic grid, every time a new as-
signment is given, additional elements in the array may be activated. In general, the activation
gets affected in all pending assignments that are in the same row or the same column. Consider
Figure 4 that shows six pending tasks: “investigate about dolphins”, “investigate geography
topic”, “read about dolphins”, “read geography topic”, “read chemistry topic”, and “write
about geography topic”. Suppose that the student is currently processing “investigate about
dolphins”. Thus, this processing will affect the activation of all the tasks that require the in-
vestigation of something, or those actions that imply dolphins’ topics. For example, if a
student is using the Internet to investigate about dolphins and he finds an excellent information
bank, he will surely use this same bank to perform his assignment on “investigate geography
topic”. In the same way, it is very likely that every minute he spends on “investigate about
dolphins” will affect positively his performance on “read about dolphins” and vice versa.
Because the emotion gives information about how urgently an assignment requires atten-
tion, it is proposed to use the emotion value to select the assignment (or task) to be processed
in each unit of time. Specifically, the assignment with the least emotion but with a>0 is se-
lected for processing. As the level of activation never reaches 0, a threshold of 0.01 was
used (note that other threshold values can be used). Thus, any assignment with an activation
level less than 0.01 is considered inactive. When humans relax their minds through meditation
or distraction, even thoughts with little activation can become scheduled for processing. This
is why a relaxed student may suddenly remember that he has to work on an assignment.

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Figure 4: Activation Flow in the Action-topic Grid

Simulation Results
This section includes several computer simulations to explore and consider the proposed
method. To perform the simulations, two data sets were built. The first set contained some
of the typical actions performed by students: comprehend, draw, investigate, read, sketch,
solve, study, type, write, etc. The second set included some common school topics, such as:
the atom, the cell, chemistry, electronic circuits, computers, dolphins, finance, geography,
math, plants, etc. Once these two sets were built, a fixed amount of work was set to each
assignment. Note that the amount of work w i to be done to complete a specific assignment
is a real number between 0 and 1. Several parameters were set to perform these simulations.
For instance, all the simulation results were performed using p w =0.01 (the amount of work
done per unit of time by the student). Note that other values for p w can also be used. However,
some values are not that useful. Specifically, if p w =1.0, this will imply that the student can
make all the decisions and actions required to perform a complex assignment in one single
unit of time; the obtained results would not be very revealing. Thus, a value of p w =0.01
was used to make the life of this student interesting; namely, he will have to make decisions
about what to do and when to do it.
The other simulation parameter that can be adjusted is k. This parameter controls how the
activation increases or decreases. A value of k = 0.05 was used in all the computer simulations
of this section.

Correlated Task List

The first simulation is described by the task list in Figure 5 and includes eight assignments.
The total amount of work to be performed by the student is 3.0 work units. Generally
speaking, the simulation is designed so that the student reviews each topic in two assignments.

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For example, the topic of electronic circuits is used in tasks three and four. Additionally, the
actions (or skills) are simultaneously used in several assignments. For example, “ read ” is
used in “ read about finance ” and “ read geography topic ” . In this case, the student may
improve his reading skills while performing task number one and he will take advantage of
this improvement while working on assignment number five. Because of the correlation
among the topics and the skills in this list, it is called a task list with correlated data. Figure
6 shows the action-topic grid for this task list.
Figure 7 shows the respective student emotion for the list of assignments in Figure 5. The
simulation begins with an emotion of 0.4, and then it quickly reaches a peak of 0.5. As time
goes by the student emotion decreases and reaches a minimum of 0.2. By the time 130, the
student begins completing some of the assignments and the resulting emotion rises. By the
end of the simulation, the student completes all his assignments and the final emotion reaches
a positive value of one. The graph in Figure 7 was obtained by running a computer simulation
written in the C++ language. This simulation runs on a computer with Microsoft Windows
and can be downloaded at http://www.ingenierias.ugto.mx/profesores/sledesma/docu-
mentos/Brain.msi).

Figure 5: A Task List with Correlated Data

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Figure 6: Action-topic Grid Organization for the Task List with Correlated Data

Figure 7: Emotion as a Function of Time for the Task List with Correlated Data

Uncorrel ated task list

Figure 8 shows a task list where each action and each topic is included in one and only one
assignment. For example, “read ” and “ finance” are included only in the “read about
finance” assignment. Observe that neither “read” nor “finance” is included in any other as-
signment. As is evident, assignment lists with uncorrelated data (many topics and skills) re-
quire more memory and produce greater levels of stress in students than task lists with cor-

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related data (few topics and skills). Thus, reducing the number of topics and actions covered
in the classroom during a fixed period of time may improve learning and reduce stress in
students.

Figure 8: A Task List with Uncorrelated Data

This last simulation corresponds to the task list in Figure 8. This task list does not repeat
topics or actions. The reader is invited to compare the number of assignments and amount
of work of the task lists in Figures 5 and 8; both of them are the same. The only difference
between these two task lists is the number of topics and actions involved.

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Figure 9: Action-topic Grid Organization for the Task List with Uncorrelated Data

Figure 9 shows the action-topic grid for the task list of Figure 8 just after all the items were
removed from the task list. The diagonal structure of the data in the action-topic grid indicates
the fact that at any one time, all but one task will lose activation making the full execution
of this task list difficult for a student.
Figure 10 shows the emotion for the task list of Figure 8. As can be seen from this figure,
after time 35 the student experiences a slightly negative emotion. As time goes by, the student
is not able to complete his assignments and his emotion becomes more negative. By comparing
Figures 7 and 10, it is easy to observe that a student will experience a more negative emotion
when his assignments include more topics and more skills than when his assignments include
only a few topics and actions (or skills). It is important to mention again that both task lists
require the same amount of work. These results might impact curricula design in the future.
Consider, for example, a curricula design where the math classes are covered at the beginning,
while some courses previous to graduation require math skills, see [17]. Several techniques
have already been proposed to address these issues, see [3], [6], [15] and [19].

Figure 10: Emotion as a Function of Time for a Task List with Uncorrelated Data

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Summary
We have presented a simple model, based on emotions, to schedule tasks. Even though human
beings are ruled greatly by their emotions, current research has not focused on quantifying
an emotion or used them to unravel other problem areas. The proposed algorithm tries to
mimic some of the logical behavior observed in the human brain. For this specific case, a
school assignment was described by one action and one topic. The student memory was ar-
ranged in a 2D grid (named action-topic grid); in the horizontal direction the different school
topics were positioned, while in the vertical direction the different possible school activities
were located. Each assignment was represented by a cell in this grid, and has associated a
given activation. This level of activation decreases with time if no work is being performed
on the assignment. However, the level of activation may increase if the same action (skill)
or topic is being activated by other assignments. Additionally, each assignment has a fixed
amount of work to be done by the student. In each time unit, the student performs some work
on a specific assignment; the amount of pending work decreases until it reaches zero. In
some cases, if the activation is too low, the student may forget to complete one or more as-
signments.
The emotion is a function of the activation and the amount of pending work. When the
activation is small, and the amount of pending work is high, the resulting emotion is negative.
This negative emotion tells the student that something bad is happening; specifically an in-
complete dormant assignment is being born. On the other hand, a positive emotion indicates
that there is enough time to complete the assignment before it loses its activation. Under
these conditions, the student is happy and motivated.
Computer simulations were performed to monitor the student’s emotion when working
on few topics and skills during a period of time. Other simulations included the same amount
of work but more topics and skills. When the simulation starts and pending tasks are assigned
to the student, the student’s emotion usually decreases and may become negative. Once the
student starts completing most of the pending work, the emotion gradually increases. When
the student completes all his tasks on time, the student will have a sense of well being. In
contrast, when the student forgets to complete a task, he will experience a strong negative
emotion. In either case, it is clear that emotions play an important role in human learning.
The presented computer simulations show that it is possible to reduce the level of stress
in students by controlling the correlation among their school classes. Specifically, this is
accomplished by reducing the number of topics and skills used in each period of time.
Consequently, some topics and skills should be simultaneously used in several classes. One
possible solution is to make use of the same cases of study in several class courses. For ex-
ample, a student taking a business management class has to envision the activities of an in-
ternational corporation that requires knowledge of human population, climate, and social
activities by region. Simultaneously, the same student is taking a computer science class
where he has to design software to display statistics about the human population and world
climate. It is clear that the student will benefit from working on the same topic in both
courses.

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About the Authors

Dr. Sergio Ledesma
Sergio Ledesma received his Ph.D. in 2001 from Stevens Institute of Technology from the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He currently holds a professor and re-
searcher position at the School of Engineering from the University of Guanajuato. He is the
author of the software Neural Lab to simulate artificial neural networks and Wintempla to
develop Win32 applications. He worked as software engineering in the United States for
Barclays Global Investors and other fines corporations. His main interests are: neural networks
and artificial intelligence.

Jose Ruiz Pinales

University of Guanajuato, Mexico

Ma Guadalupe Garcia
University of Guanajuato, Mexico

Francisco Elizalde
University of Guanajuato, Mexico

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