Developing Self-Awareness in Robots via Inner Speech

Cognitive Flexibility: What Mental Health Professionals Need to Know

In the aftermath of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, increasing attention has been drawn to the physical and emotional demands of mental health professionals (MHPs) navigating workplace stressors with limited coping mechanisms. As a result, MHPs themselves are at increased risk for developing burnout and mental health disorders, including anxiety and depression. In addition, these emotional strains have impacted professional performance and career satisfaction, which poses significant challenges to the profession and patient outcomes. Cognitive flexibility (CF) is a cognitive-behavioral tool that is well-known for scaffolding resilience, encouraging self-awareness, and ameliorating workplace stressors and burnout. CF is also a teachable skill that uses many methods to encourage pre-frontal cortex neuroplasticity and practice. The current brief overview provides simple yet effective tools to enhance CF and safeguard the mental health and well-being of MHPs in the clinical setting. [Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services, xx(xx), xx-xx.].

Synthesizing Methuselah: The Question of Artificial Agelessness

As biological organisms, we age and, eventually, die. However, age's deteriorating effects may not be universal. Some theoretical entities, due to their synthetic composition, could exist independently from aging-artificial general intelligence (AGI). With adequate resource access, an AGI could theoretically be ageless and would be, in some sense, immortal. Yet, this need not be inevitable. Designers could imbue AGIs with artificial mortality via an internal shut-off point. The question, though, is, should they? Should researchers curtail an AGI's potentially endless lifespan by deliberately making it mortal? It is this question that this article explores. First, it considers what type of AGI is under discussion before outlining how such beings could be ageless. Then, after clarifying the type of immortality under discussion and arguing that imbuing an AGI with synthetic aging would be person-affecting, the article explores four core conundrums: (i) deliberately causing a morally significant being's death; (ii) immortality's associated harms; (iii) concerns about immortality's unequal assignment; and (iv) the danger of immortal AGI overlords. The article concludes that while prudence requires we create an aging AGI, in the face of the material harm such an action would constitute, this is an insufficient reason to justify doing so.

Inner speech as language process and cognitive tool

Many people report a form of internal language known as inner speech (IS). This review examines recent growth of research interest in the phenomenon, which has broadly supported a theoretical model in which IS is a functional language process that can confer benefits for cognition in a range of domains. A key insight to have emerged in recent years is that IS is an embodied experience characterized by varied subjective qualities, which can be usefully modeled in artificial systems and whose neural signals have the potential to be decoded through advancing brain-computer interface technologies. Challenges for future research include understanding individual differences in IS and mapping form to function across IS subtypes.

Robot's Inner Speech Effects on Human Trust and Anthropomorphism

Inner Speech is an essential but also elusive human psychological process that refers to an everyday covert internal conversation with oneself. We argued that programming a robot with an overt self-talk system that simulates human inner speech could enhance both human trust and users' perception of robot's anthropomorphism, animacy, likeability, intelligence and safety. For this reason, we planned a pre-test/post-test control group design. Participants were divided in two different groups, one experimental group and one control group. Participants in the experimental group interacted with the robot Pepper equipped with an over inner speech system whereas participants in the control group interacted with the robot that produces only outer speech. Before and after the interaction, both groups of participants were requested to complete some questionnaires about inner speech and trust. Results showed differences between participants' pretest and post-test assessment responses, suggesting that the robot's inner speech influences in participants of experimental group the perceptions of animacy and intelligence in robot. Implications for these results are discussed.

Self-Consciousness and Self-Awareness: Associations between Stable and Transitory Levels of Evidence

The theory of objective self-awareness predicts the assessment of stable or dispositional self-consciousness and transitory or situational self-awareness. The aim of the present research was to investigate potential associations between patterns of experiential self-description to scores on self-report measures of dispositional self-consciousness. A total of 64 Brazilian volunteers (Mage = 29.7, SD = 8.79, 64.1% female) responded to the Revised Self-Consciousness Scale, the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale, and the Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire before participating in an experience sampling protocol. The protocol consisted of random daily requests for up to four self-description experiences across seven consecutive days. Participants recorded audio messages on their mobile phones in reply to each request describing their current experience. Reports were analyzed through a reflexive thematic analysis that produced twenty sub-themes accounting for descriptive markers of experience. Based on those descriptive markers, the qualitative data were then transformed into quantitative data for the situational self-awareness indexes. Evidence of association between self-consciousness and self-awareness was stronger for the awareness subscale in a positive correlation with affective situational self-awareness and in a negative correlation with mental representational transitory self-awareness. Although relational evidence has been provided, the data reinforced the theoretical distinction between self-consciousness and self-awareness.

Influence of agent's self-disclosure on human empathy

As AI technologies progress, social acceptance of AI agents, including intelligent virtual agents and robots, is becoming even more important for more applications of AI in human society. One way to improve the relationship between humans and anthropomorphic agents is to have humans empathize with the agents. By empathizing, humans act positively and kindly toward agents, which makes it easier for them to accept the agents. In this study, we focus on self-disclosure from agents to humans in order to increase empathy felt by humans toward anthropomorphic agents. We experimentally investigate the possibility that self-disclosure from an agent facilitates human empathy. We formulate hypotheses and experimentally analyze and discuss the conditions in which humans have more empathy toward agents. Experiments were conducted with a three-way mixed plan, and the factors were the agents' appearance (human, robot), self-disclosure (high-relevance self-disclosure, low-relevance self-disclosure, no self-disclosure), and empathy before/after a video stimulus. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed using data from 918 participants. We found that the appearance factor did not have a main effect, and self-disclosure that was highly relevant to the scenario used facilitated more human empathy with a statistically significant difference. We also found that no self-disclosure suppressed empathy. These results support our hypotheses. This study reveals that self-disclosure represents an important characteristic of anthropomorphic agents which helps humans to accept them.

Self-Awareness and Self-Consciousness: A Review from the Perspective of Social Psychology

The terms of self-awareness and self-consciousness, which have been mentioned under various different names for centuries, they are also studied experimentally in social psychology. Within the concept of this study, the information about descriptions, raised theories, suggested concepts, significant studies and adjusted scales on these terms are reviewed from the perspective of social psychology. Although there are various different descriptions of these terms under various disciplines and a wide range of relevant literature, this study is approached only from the perspective of social psychology and limited with the most efficient studies included in the published social psychology literature. The review shall be an enlightening source for the researchers studying on social psychology and the self-concept and is concluded with suggestions on further research interests.

The Prospects of Artificial Consciousness: Ethical Dimensions and Concerns

Can machines be conscious and what would be the ethical implications? This article gives an overview of current robotics approaches toward machine consciousness and considers factors that hamper an understanding of machine consciousness. After addressing the epistemological question of how we would know whether a machine is conscious and discussing potential advantages of potential future machine consciousness, it outlines the role of consciousness for ascribing moral status. As machine consciousness would most probably differ considerably from human consciousness, several complex questions must be addressed, including what forms of machine consciousness would be morally relevant forms of consciousness, and what the ethical implications of morally relevant forms of machine consciousness would be. While admittedly part of this reflection is speculative in nature, it clearly underlines the need for a detailed conceptual analysis of the concept of artificial consciousness and stresses the imperative to avoid building machines with morally relevant forms of consciousness. The article ends with some suggestions for potential future regulation of machine consciousness.

A theory of consciousness from a theoretical computer science perspective: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine

This paper examines consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science (TCS), a branch of mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the implications and surprising consequences of resource limitations. We propose a formal TCS model, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM). The CTM is influenced by Alan Turing's simple yet powerful model of computation, the Turing machine (TM), and by the global workspace theory (GWT) of consciousness originated by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars and further developed by him, Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux, George Mashour, and others. Phenomena generally associated with consciousness, such as blindsight, inattentional blindness, change blindness, dream creation, and free will, are considered. Explanations derived from the model draw confirmation from consistencies at a high level, well above the level of neurons, with the cognitive neuroscience literature.

Autopoiesis and Its Efficacy—A Metacybernetic View

This paper seeks to explain the nature of autopoiesis and its capacity to be efficacious, and to do this, it uses agency theory as embedded in metacybernetics. Agency, as a generalised intelligent adaptive living system, can anticipate the future once it has internalised a representation of an active contextual situation through autopoiesis. The role of observation and the nature of internalisation will be discussed, explaining that the latter has two states that determine agency properties of cognition. These are assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation is an information process and results in implicit cognition and recognition, whereas accommodation uses assimilated information delivering explicit cognition, recognition, and conscious awareness with rationality. Similarly, anticipation, a required property of the living, has two states, weak and strong, and these correspond to the two states of internalisation. Autopoiesis has various properties identifiable through the lenses of three autonomous but configurable schemas: General Collective Intelligence (GCI), Eigenform, and Extreme Physical Information (EPI). GCI is a pragmatic evolutionary approach concerned with a contextually connected purposeful and relatable set of task processes, each undertaken by a team of subagencies seeking collective fitness. Eigenform is a symbolic approach that is concerned with how observations can be suitably internalised and thus be used as a token to determine future behaviour, and how that which has been internalised can be adopted to anticipate the future. Extreme Physical Information (EPI) is an empirical approach concerned with acquiring information through observation of an unknown parameter through sampling regimes. The paper represents the conceptualisations of each schema in terms of autopoietic efficacy, and explores their configurative possibilities. It will adopt the ideas delivered to enhance explanations of the nature of autopoiesis and its efficacy within metacybernetics, providing a shift in thinking about autopoiesis and self-organisation.

From Affordances to Abstract Words: The Flexibility of Sensorimotor Grounding

The sensorimotor system plays a critical role in several cognitive processes. Here, we review recent studies documenting this interplay at different levels. First, we concentrate on studies that have shown how the sensorimotor system is flexibly involved in interactions with objects. We report evidence demonstrating how social context and situations influence affordance activation, and then focus on tactile and kinesthetic components in body-object interactions. Then, we turn to word use, and review studies that have shown that not only concrete words, but also abstract words are grounded in the sensorimotor system. We report evidence that abstract concepts activate the mouth effector more than concrete concepts, and discuss this effect in light of studies on adults, children, and infants. Finally, we pinpoint possible sensorimotor mechanisms at play in the acquisition and use of abstract concepts. Overall, we show that the involvement of the sensorimotor system is flexibly modulated by context, and that its role can be integrated and flanked by that of other systems such as the linguistic system. We suggest that to unravel the role of the sensorimotor system in cognition, future research should fully explore the complexity of this intricate, and sometimes slippery, relation.

The effects of implementing phenomenology in a deep neural network

There have been several recent attempts at using Artificial Intelligence systems to model aspects of consciousness (Gamez, 2008; Reggia, 2013). Deep Neural Networks have been given additional functionality in the present attempt, allowing them to emulate phenological aspects of consciousness by self-generating information representing multi-modal inputs as either sounds or images. We added these functions to determine whether knowledge of the input's modality aids the networks' learning. In some cases, these representations caused the model to be more accurate after training and for less training to be required for the model to reach its highest accuracy scores.

Automation Inner Speech as an Anthropomorphic Feature Affecting Human Trust: Current Issues and Future Directions

This paper aims to discuss the possible role of inner speech in influencing trust in human-automation interaction. Inner speech is an everyday covert inner monolog or dialog with oneself, which is essential for human psychological life and functioning as it is linked to self-regulation and self-awareness. Recently, in the field of machine consciousness, computational models using different forms of robot speech have been developed that make it possible to implement inner speech in robots. As is discussed, robot inner speech could be a new feature affecting human trust by increasing robot transparency and anthropomorphism.

What robots want? Hearing the inner voice of a robot

The inner speech is thoroughly studied in humans, and it represents an interdisciplinary research issue involving psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy. A few papers only, mostly theoretical, analyze the role of inner speech in robots. The present study investigates the potential of the robot's inner speech while cooperating with human partners. A cognitive architecture is designed and integrated with standard robot routines into a complex framework. Two threads of interaction are discussed by setting the robot operations with and without inner speech. Thanks to the robotic self-dialog, the partner can easily trace the robot's processes. Moreover, the robot can better solve conflicts leading to successful goal achievements. The results show that functional and transparency requirements, according to the international standards ISO/TS:2016 and COMEST/Unesco for collaborative robots, are better met when inner speech accompanies human-robot interaction. The inner speech could be applied in many robotics contexts, such as learning, regulation, and attention.

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An inner speech cognitive architecture enables robots for rehearsing and self-talk

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Robot's inner speech affects functionality and transparency in human-robot cooperation

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To self-talk enables the robot to further reasoning and plans in accomplishing the task

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The inner speech is applicable in many robotics contexts as learning and regulation