4.5 Globalist versus Localist Representations 87

4.5 Globalist versus Localist Representations 87 etc. are recognized. These recognized entities, called percepts, are passed to the workspace, where a model of the agent’s current situation is assembled. Workspace structures serve as cues to the two forms of episodic memory, yielding both short and long term remembered local associations. In addition to the current percept, the workspace contains recent percepts that haven’t yet decayed away, and the agent’s model of the then- current situation previously assembled from them. The model of the agent’s current situation is updated from the previous model using the remaining percepts and associations. This updating process will typically require looking back to perceptual memory and even to sensory memory, to enable the understanding of relations and situations. This assembled new model constitutes the agent’s understanding of its current situation within its world. Via constructing the model, the agent has made sense of the incoming stimuli. Now attention allocation comes into play, because a real agent lacks the computational re- sources to work with all parts of its world-model with maximal mental focus. Portions of the model compete for attention. These competing portions take the form of (potentially overlap- ping) coalitions of structures comprising parts the model. Once one such coalition wins the competition, the agent has decided what to focus its attention on. And now comes the purpose of all this processing: to help the agent to decide what to do next. The winning coalition passes to the global workspace, the namesake of Global Workspace Theory, from which it is broadcast globally. Though the contents of this conscious broadcast are available globally, the primary recipient is procedural memory, which stores templates of possible actions including their context and possible results. Procedural memory also stores an activation value for each such template — a value that attempts to measure the likelihood of an action taken within its context producing the ex- pected result. It’s worth noting that LIDA makes a rather specific assumption here. LIDA’s “activation” values are like the probabilistic truth values of the implications in CogPrime’s Context \ Procedure > Goal triples. However, in CogPrime this probability is not the same as the ShortTermImportance “attention value” associated with the Implication link representing that implication. Here LIDA merges together two concepts that in CogPrime are separate. Templates whose contexts intersect sufficiently with the contents of the conscious broadcast instantiate copies of themselves with their variables specified to the current situation. These instantiations are passed to the action selection mechanism, which chooses a single action from these instantiations and those remaining from previous cycles. The chosen action then goes to sensorimotor memory, where it picks up the appropriate algorithm by which it is then executed. The action so taken affects the environment, and the cycle is complete. The LIDA model hypothesizes that all human cognitive processing is via a continuing iter- ation of such cognitive cycles. It acknowledges that other cognitive processes may also occur, refining and building on the knowledge used in the cognitive cycle (for instance, the cognitive cycle itself doesn’t mention abstract reasoning or creativity). But the idea is that these other processes occur in the context of the cognitive cycle, which is the main loop driving the internal and external activities of the organism. 4.5.9.1 Avoiding Combinatorial Explosion via Adaptive Attention Allocation LIDA avoids combinatorial explosions in its inference processes via two methods, both of which are also important in CogPrime : e combining reasoning via association with reasoning via deduction HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013003