Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Feb 19:7:16.
doi: 10.3389/frobt.2020.00016. eCollection 2020.

Developing Self-Awareness in Robots via Inner Speech

Antonio Chella  1   2 , Arianna Pipitone  1 , Alain Morin  3 , Famira Racy  4
Affiliations

Developing Self-Awareness in Robots via Inner Speech

Antonio Chella et al. Front Robot AI. .

Abstract

The experience of inner speech is a common one. Such a dialogue accompanies the introspection of mental life and fulfills essential roles in human behavior, such as self-restructuring, self-regulation, and re-focusing on attentional resources. Although the underpinning of inner speech is mostly investigated in psychological and philosophical fields, the research in robotics generally does not address such a form of self-aware behavior. Existing models of inner speech inspire computational tools to provide a robot with this form of self-awareness. Here, the widespread psychological models of inner speech are reviewed, and a cognitive architecture for a robot implementing such a capability is outlined in a simplified setup.

Keywords: cognitive cycle; human-robot interaction; inner speech; robot; self-awareness.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The Pepper robot employed for the experiments reported in the paper.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The cognitive architecture for inner and private speech.
Figure 3
Figure 3
A fragment of the declarative LTM implemented by a semantic network.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The operation of the perception module. It classifies the input signals by generating suitable symbolic labels that are sent to the phonological store (PS).
Figure 5
Figure 5
The phonological store receives in input the label generated by the perception module. Then, the central executive (CE) looks for information from the LTM and the phrase is generated by the phonological loop (PL).
Figure 6
Figure 6
The robot internally rehearses the phrase by the covert articulation module, thus generating the robot inner speech.
Figure 7
Figure 7
The robot externally rehearses the phrase by the covert articulation module. The phrase is in turn perceived by the perception module, thus generating the robot private speech.
Figure 8
Figure 8
The robot associates the apple with the orange as they are both fruits and it generates the phrase which in turn generates the expectation of an orange in the scene by the motor module.
Figure 9
Figure 9
The expectation of an orange in the scene is satisfied by the perception module which generates the label .
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Abbass H. A., Scholz J., Reid D. J. (eds.). (2018). Foundations of trusted autonomy: an introduction, in Foundations of Trusted Autonomy, Studies in Systems, Decision and Control (Cham: Springer; ), 117 10.1007/978-3-319-64816-3_1 - DOI
    1. Alderson-Day B., Fernyhough C. (2015). Inner speech: development, cognitive functions, phenomenology, and neurobiology. Psychol. Bull. 141, 931–965. 10.1037/bul0000021 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Amit D. (1988). Modeling Brain Function. The World of Attractor Neural Networks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 10.1017/CBO9780511623257 - DOI
    1. Arrabales R. (2012). Inner speech generation in a video game non-player character: from explanation to self? Int. J. Mach. Conscious. 4, 367–381. 10.1142/S1793843012400215 - DOI
    1. Baars B. J. (1997). In the Theather of Consciousness. The Workspace of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195102659.001.1 - DOI

LinkOut - more resources