The effects of stress and predation on pain perception in robots

While essential for survival, seeking and consuming resources might be the source of both damage and stress in dangerous environments, such as environments with predators. While damage can be signaled by pain, pain is also an affective experience not strictly correlated with damage, such as in chronic pain, or when it is modulated by other factors, such as stress. To investigate the complex interplay between stress, pain, and resource seeking, in this paper we investigate the impact of stress on pain perception in the context of survival-related behavior selection in a robot, tested in different environments with varying levels of predation and temporal differences in exposure to predation. Our results show that cortisol-modulated pain perception is advantageous in environments with high levels of stress-related danger, such as predators, and less adaptive in environments with fewer predators and less stress-related danger.