Inner speech for a self-conscious robot

Abstract

The experience self-conscious thinking in the verbose form of inner speech is a common one. Such a covert dialogue accompanies the introspection of mental life and fulfills important roles in our cognition, such as self-regulation, self-restructuring, and re-focusing on attentional resources. Although the functional underpinning and the phenomenology of inner speech are largely investigated in psychological and philosophical fields, robotic research generally does not address such a form of self-conscious behavior. Existing models of inner speech inspire computational tools to provide the robot with a form of self-consciousness. Here, the most widespread psychological models of inner speech are reviewed, and a robot architecture implementing such a capability is outlined.