Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference.

ABSTRACT: Meta-awareness refers to the capacity to explicitly notice the current content of consciousness and has been identified as a key component for the successful control of cognitive states, such as the deliberate direction of attention. This paper proposes a formal model of meta-awareness and attentional control using hierarchical active inference. To do so, we cast mental action as policy selection over higher-level cognitive states and add a further hierarchical level to model meta-awareness states that modulate the expected confidence (precision) in the mapping between observations and hidden cognitive states. We simulate the example of mind-wandering and its regulation during a task involving sustained selective attention on a perceptual object. This provides a computational case study fo

SUBMITTER: Sandved-Smith L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8396119 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature