A Cognitive Robotics Implementation of Global Workspace Theory for Episodic Memory Interaction With Consciousness

Abstract

Artificial general intelligence revived in recent years after people achieved significant advances in machine learning and deep learning. This leads to the thinking of how real intelligence could be created. Consciousness theories believe that general intelligence is essentially conscious, yet no universal definition is agreed upon. In this work, global workspace (GW) theory is implemented and integrated with crucial cognitive components. With the focus on episodic memory and inspiration from the nature of episodic memory in psychology and neuroscience, the episodic memory component is implemented within the GW framework. In our experiment, the robotic agent operates in a real-world interactive context, forming episodic memory and demonstrating static, temporal, and context memory capabilities during interactions. Consciousness in this work engages in all formation, maintenance, and retrieval processes of episodic memory. The novelty and contributions of this work are: 1) this work is implementing episodic memory within the consciousness framework, suggesting the sustainable potential of such an integrated approach to cognitive agents with artificial general intelligence (AGI); 2) regarding the limited examples in consciousness-based cognitive architectures, this work attempts to contribute to the diversity of perspectives and approaches; 3) extant episodic memory implementations are suffering from various limitations, while this work summarises some key features for modeling episodic memory within a cognitive architecture; and 4) authors discuss the relationship between episodic memory, consciousness, and general intelligence, proposing the compatibility and relationship between machine consciousness and other AGI research. It is believed that a better alignment between them would further boost the fusion of diverse research for achieving desired cognitive machines.