ABSTRACT
Expectations have a central role in mental life and in purposive action. Indeed a crucial feature of intelligent Agents is their being pro-active not only reactive, their anticipatory representation i.e. their ability to deal with the future by mental representations or specific forms of learning. We present in this work a Cognitive Anatomy of expectations, their reduction in terms of more elementary ingredients: beliefs and goals. We base several predictions on this analytical decomposition and we present a theory of hope, worry, frustration, disappointment, relief.
