Computational Models of Consciousness-Emotion Interactions in Social Robotics: Conceptual Framework

Abstract

There is a little information on how to design a social robot that effectively executes consciousness-emotion (C-E) interaction in a socially acceptable manner. In fact, development of such socially sophisticated interactions depends on models of human high-level cognition implemented in the robot’s design. Therefore, a fundamental research problem of social robotics in terms of effective C-E interaction processing is to define a computational architecture of the robotic system in which the cognitive-emotional integration occurs and determine cognitive mechanisms underlying consciousness along with its subjective aspect in detecting emotions. Our conceptual framework rests upon assumptions of a computational approach to consciousness, which points out that consciousness and its subjective aspect are specific functions of the human brain that can be implemented into an artificial social robot’s construction. Such research framework of developing C-E addresses a field of machine consciousness that indicates important computational correlates of consciousness in such an artificial system and the possibility to objectively describe such mechanisms with quantitative parameters based on signal-detection and threshold theories.