Affective Tools for Thought: Towards Shared Attention and Affective Reorienting in AI-Supported Thinking

2026-07-29

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical limitation in current AI reasoning tools, which typically treat emotion either as cognitive noise or a secondary signal, thereby overlooking its constitutive role in shaping cognitive trajectories and neglecting mechanisms for shared attention and affective redirection. Grounded in embodied cognition theory, this work proposes that emotion is an intrinsic component of cognition and introduces a novel affect-enhanced reasoning framework centered on shared attention and affective redirection as core design principles. The approach integrates haptic-aware conversational agents, a coupled affective chain–chain-of-thought mechanism, real-time affective mirroring, and contextualized prompting. Empirical evaluation in a craft-learning context demonstrates that the proposed strategy effectively reconfigures reasoning pathways, offering a scalable design paradigm for next-generation AI reasoning tools.

Abstract

Current Tools for Thought (TfTs) treat affect as either friction that slows cognitive progress or a signal to optimise it. Drawing on enactive cognitive science, we argue that affect is constitutive of cognition: it reshapes the trajectory of thinking, not just the speed. We identify two core barriers for Affective TfTs: the lack of Shared Attention (caring, directed attention to the user's mode of engagement) and the lack of Affective Reorienting (the capacity to use emotional moments to open new trajectories rather than reinforcing predetermined ones), and propose three design strategies that address both: Chain of Emotion X Chain of Thought, Affective Mirror, and Prompted Reorienting. The strategies are grounded in empirical findings from a study of a touch-aware conversational agent for embodied craft learning, and are oriented as provocations for future design.

Problem

• Affective Tools for Thought
• Shared Attention
• Affective Reorienting
• Enactive Cognition
• Emotion-Cognition Integration

Innovation

• Affective Tools for Thought
• Shared Attention
• Affective Reorienting
• Chain of Emotion
• Enactive Cognition