Luiz Pessoa

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About

Luiz Pessoa is a neuroscientist whose work sits at the compelling intersection of emotion, cognition, and intelligence — both biological and artificial. Best known for his influential 2017 paper "Do Intelligent Robots Need Emotion?" which has garnered 39 citations, Pessoa has been a prominent voice arguing that emotion is not peripheral to intelligence but fundamentally inseparable from it. Drawing on decades of research in cognitive and affective neuroscience, his work challenges traditional boundaries between feeling and thinking, making the case that truly intelligent systems — whether human brains or artificial agents — cannot function effectively without emotional processing. His 2020 follow-up, "Emotion in Future Intelligent Machines," extends these ideas into the rapidly evolving field of robotics and AI, exploring how insights from neuroscience can inform the design of emotionally capable artificial systems. Pessoa's contributions have helped reshape how researchers across neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence think about the role of affect in cognition, sparking important conversations about what it genuinely means to build intelligent machines and deepening our understanding of the human mind in the process.