Cognitive Science Quarterly (2000) 1, ..-.. Received 03.03.04 © 2000 HERMES SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS Distributed Cognition through Active Mental Entities: an Argumentation-Based Approach 1 P. Baroni, D. Fogli, M. Giacomin, G. Guida Università di Brescia, Italy 2 This paper introduces the active mental entities approach to the design of intelligent autonomous agents. In this approach, mental attitudes are conceived as active computational entities and the overall mental activity of an agent results from their independent operation and in- teraction. In order to provide a formal support to this approach, we propose argumentation theory as a basis for the definition of interac- tion mechanisms among active mental entities. To this purpose, a novel distributed argumentation algorithm is devised. Finally, we give some operation examples in the context of a robotic application. Keywords: agent architecture, distributed cognition, mental attitudes, argumentation, conflict resolution. 1. Introduction A major problem in the field of autonomous agents is how an agent with limited resources can cope with two often conflicting requirements: – sensing, reasoning, and acting in accordance with the real-time con- straints imposed by the environment; – maintaining a behavior coherent with agent motivations and oriented to the achievement of endogenous goals (Castelfranchi, 1995). For the satisfaction of the above requirements, this paper proposes an in- novative approach to model and design autonomous agents, which is based on two main standpoints. 1 We thank the anonymous referees and the guest editors for their insightful comments and suggestions. 2 Address for correspondence: Prof. Pietro Baroni, Dipartimento di Elettronica per l’Automazione, Università di Brescia, Via Branze 38, 25123 Brescia, Italy. E-mail: baroni@ing.unibs.it