Frontiers in Psychology
2022
Christian Kronsted, Sean Kugele, Zachariah A Neemeh et al.
7 citations
Much of our everyday, embodied action comes in the form of smooth coping. Smooth coping is skillful action that has become habituated and ingrained, generally placing less stress on cognitive load than considered and deliberative thought and action. When performed with skill and expertise, walking, driving, skiing, musical performances, and short-order cooking are all examples of the...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2021
Zachariah A Neemeh, Christian Kronsted, Sean Kugele et al.
A body schema is an agent’s model of its own body that enables it to act on affordances in the environment. This paper presents a body schema system for the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent (LIDA) cognitive architecture. LIDA is a conceptual and computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory, also integrating other theories from neuroscience and psychology. This paper contends that...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin, Thomas Zoega Ramsoy
A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling elements. In computational applications, GW architectures recruit many distributed, specialized agents to cooperate in resolving focal ambiguities. In the brain, conscious experiences may reflect a GW function. For animals, the natural world is full of unpredictable dangers and...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
June 1, 2011
Wendell Wallach, Colin Allen, Stan Franklin
36 citations
What roles or functions does consciousness fulfill in the making of moral decisions? Will artificial agents capable of making appropriate decisions in morally charged situations require machine consciousness? Should the capacity to make moral decisions be considered an attribute essential for being designated a fully conscious agent? Research on the prospects for developing machines capable of...
IGI Global eBooks
May 24, 2011
Stan Franklin
18 citations
Here we describe an architecture for an autonomous software agent designed to model a broad spectrum of human cognitive and affective functioning. In addition to featuring “consciousness,” the architecture accommodates perception, several forms of memory, emotions, action-selection, deliberation, ersatz language generation, several forms of learning, and metacognition. One such software agent,...
PLoS One
April 25, 2011
Tamas Madl, Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin
We propose that human cognition consists of cascading cycles of recurring brain events. Each cognitive cycle senses the current situation, interprets it with reference to ongoing goals, and then selects an internal or external action in response. While most aspects of the cognitive cycle are unconscious, each cycle also yields a momentary "ignition" of conscious broadcasting. Neuroscientists...
Advances in Consciousness Research
October 28, 2010
Stan Franklin, Bernard J. Baars
Unconscious processes come in two varieties, the preconscious, whose contents may become conscious, and the never-conscious, whose contents may not. In this chapter we make use of Global Workspace Theory and its LIDA model to catalogue never-conscious and preconscious processes, and offer an explanation of the functionally of the distinction. The LIDA/GWT model suggests that the functional...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
December 1, 2009
Uma Ramamurthy, Stan Franklin
6 citations
Cognitive theories of consciousness should provide effective frameworks to implement machine consciousness. The Global Workspace Theory is a leading theory of consciousness which postulates that the primary function of consciousness is a global broadcast that facilitates recruitment of internal resources to deal with the current situation as well as modulate several types of learning. In this...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
May 19, 2009
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin
149 citations
We argue that the functions of consciousness are implemented in a bio-computational manner. That is to say, the conscious as well as the non-conscious aspects of human thinking, planning, and perception are produced by adaptive, biological algorithms. We propose that machine consciousness may be produced by similar adaptive algorithms running on the machine.Global Workspace Theory is currently...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
May 19, 2009
Stan Franklin, Sidney K. D’Mello, Bernard J. Baars et al.
22 citations
The currently leading cognitive theory of consciousness, Global Workspace Theory (Baars 1988, 2003), postulates that the primary functions of consciousness include a global broadcast serving to recruit internal resources with which to deal with the current situation and to modulate several types of learning. In addition, conscious experiences present current conditions and problems to a “self ”...
Neural Networks
September 18, 2007
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin
While neural net models have been developed to a high degree of sophistication, they have some drawbacks at a more integrative, "architectural" level of analysis. We describe a "hybrid" cognitive architecture that is implementable in neuronal nets, and which has uniform brainlike features, including activation-passing and highly distributed "codelets," implementable as small-scale neural nets....
Cambridge University Press eBooks
May 14, 2007
Ron Sun, Stan Franklin
30 citations
This chapter aims to provide an overview of existing computational (mechanistic) models of cognition in relation to the study of consciousness, on the basis of psychological and philosophical theories and data. It examines various mechanistic explanations of consciousness in existing computational cognitive models. Serving as an example for the discussions, a computational model of the...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 2005
Stan Franklin
In his article on The Liabilities of Mobility, asserts that "Consciousness presents us with a stable arena for our actions-the world ..." and argues for this property as providing evolutionary pressure for the evolution of consciousness. In this commentary, I will explore the implications of Merker's ideas for consciousness in artificial agents as well as animals, and also meet some possible...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2003
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin
Active components of classical working memory are conscious, but traditional theory does not account for this fact. Global Workspace theory suggests that consciousness is needed to recruit unconscious specialized networks that carry out detailed working memory functions. The IDA model provides a fine-grained analysis of this process, specifically of two classical working-memory tasks, verbal...