Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference.
Neuroscience of consciousness January 1, 2021 Lars Sandved-Smith, Casper Hesp, Jérémie Mattout et al. 116 citations
Meta-awareness, the ability to notice the current content of consciousness, is crucial for controlling cognitive states like directing attention. This paper models meta-awareness and attentional control using hierarchical active inference, treating mental actions as policy choices over higher-level cognitive states. A further hierarchical level represents meta-awareness states that modulate the expected confidence in the mapping between observations and hidden cognitive states. Simulations of mind-wandering during a sustained selective attention task illustrate how this inferential architecture enables accessing and controlling cognitive states, offering a computational foundation for a phenomenology of mental action and self-monitoring.