Modeling the subjective perspective of consciousness and its role in the control of behaviours

Summary

Consciousness may function as a global workspace that integrates multimodal information, monitors expectations, and guides action. Using the Projective Consciousness Model, which draws on projective geometry, the authors operationalize subjective perspective and show how it can account for an inverse distance law linking appraisal and distance. They develop a generative model of affective and epistemic drives based on subjective parameters like apparent object size, and extend it to implement Theory of Mind consistent with simulation theory. Simulations of artificial agents, grounded in psychological rationale, demonstrate how varying model parameters produce adaptive and maladaptive behaviors relevant to clinical and developmental psychology, including resilience, joint attention, false-belief exploitation, social anxiety avoidance, and restricted interests in autism. Agent behaviors were also demonstrated in a robotic context.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Consciousness has been hypothesized to operate as a global workspace, which accesses and integrates multimodal information in a unified manner, supports expectation violation monitoring and reduction, and the motivation, programming and control of action. One important yet open issue concerns how the subjective perspective at the core of consciousness, and subjective properties of manifestation of the environment in such perspective as an embodied experience, plays a role in such process. We operationalised the concept of subjective perspective using the principles of the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM), based on the projective geometrical concept of Field of Consciousness. We show how these principles can account for documented relationships between appraisal and distance as an inverse distance law, yield a generative model of affective and epistemic drives based on purely subjective parameters, such as the apparent size of objects, and can be generalised to implement Theory of Mind, in a manner that is consistent with simulation theory. We used simulations of artificial agents, based on psychological rationale, to demonstrate how different model parameters could generate a variety of emergent adaptive and maladaptive behaviours that are relevant to developmental and clinical psychology: the ability to be resilient in the face of obstacles through imaginary projections, the emergence of social approach and joint attention behaviours, the ability to take advantage of false beliefs attributed to others, the emergence of avoidance behaviours as observed in social anxiety disorders, the presence of restricted interests as observed in autism spectrum disorders. The simulation of agents was applied to a specific robotic context, and agents' behaviours were demonstrated by controlling the corresponding robots.