Towards Parallel Selective Attention Using Psychophysiological States as the Basis for Functional Cognition.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

Attention is a complex cognitive process with innate resource management and information selection capabilities for maintaining a certain level of functional awareness in socio-cognitive service agents. The human-machine society depends on creating illusionary believable behaviors. These behaviors include processing sensory information based on contextual adaptation and focusing on specific aspects. The cognitive processes based on selective attention help the agent to efficiently utilize its computational resources by scheduling its intellectual tasks, which are not limited to decision-making, goal planning, action selection, and execution of actions. This study reports ongoing work on developing a cognitive architectural framework, a Nature-inspired Humanoid Cognitive Computing Platform for Self-aware and Conscious Agents (NiHA). The NiHA comprises cognitive theories, frameworks, and applications within machine consciousness (MC) and artificial general intelligence (AGI). The paper is focused on top-down and bottom-up attention mechanisms for service agents as a step towards machine consciousness. This study evaluates the behavioral impact of psychophysical states on attention. The proposed agent attains almost 90% accuracy in attention generation. In social interaction, contextual-based working is important, and the agent attains 89% accuracy in its attention by adding and checking the effect of psychophysical states on parallel selective attention. The addition of the emotions to attention process produced more contextual-based responses.

Authors

  • Asma Kanwal
    School of Computer Science, National College of Business Administration & Economics, Lahore 54000, Pakistan.
  • Sagheer Abbas
    Department of Computer Science, National College of Business Administration and Economics, Lahore, Pakistan.
  • Taher M Ghazal
    Center for Cyber Security, Faculty of Information Science and Technology, University Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia.
  • Allah Ditta
    Department of Environmental Sciences, Shaheed Benazir Bhutto University Sheringal, Dir (U), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 18000, Pakistan; School of Biological Sciences, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Perth, WA, 6009, Australia. Electronic address: allah.ditta@sbbu.edu.pk.
  • Hani Alquhayz
    Department of Computer Science and Information, College of Science in Zulfi, Majmaah University, Al-Majmaah 11952, Saudi Arabia.
  • Muhammad Adnan Khan
    Department of Computer Science, National College of Business Administration and Economics, Lahore, Pakistan.