Um modelo cognitivo baseado na atenção para consciência em robôs inteligentes

Understanding consciousness is one of the most fascinating challenges of our time. From ancient civilizations to modern philosophers, questions have been asked on how one is conscious of his/her own existence and about the world that surrounds him/her. Although there is no precise definition for consciousness, there is an agreement that it is strongly related to human cognitive processes such as: thinking, reasoning, emotions, wishes. One of the key processes to the arising of the consciousness is the attention, a process capable of promoting a selection of a few stimuli from a huge amount of information that reaches us constantly. Machine consciousness is the field of the artificial intelligence that investigate the possibility of the production of conscious processes in artificial devices. This work presents a review about the theme of consciousness - in both natural and artificial aspects -, discussing this theme from the philosophical and computational perspectives, and investigates the feasibility of the adoption of an attentional schema as the base to the cognitive processing. A formal computational model is proposed for conscious agents that integrates: short and long term memories, reasoning, planning, emotion, decision making, learning, motivation and volition. Computer experiments in a mobile robotics domain under USARSim simulation environment, proposed by RoboCup, suggest that the agent can be able to use these elements to acquire experiences based on environment stimuli. The adoption of the cognitive architecture over the attentional model has potential to allow the emergence of behaviours usually associated to the consciousness in the simulated mobile robots. Further implementation under this model could potentially allow the agent to express sentience, selfawareness, self-consciousness, autonoetic consciousness, mineness and perspectivalness. By performing computation over an attentional space, the model also allows the ...

Comparing the Teaching-Learning Process With and Without the Use of Computerized Technological Resources

Computerized technological resources have become essential in education, particularly for teaching topics that require the performance of specific tasks. These resources can effectively help the execution of such tasks and the teaching-learning process itself. After the development of a Web site on the topic of nursing staff scheduling, this study aimed at comparing the development of students involved in the teaching-learning process of the previously mentioned topic, with and without the use of computer technology. Two random groups of undergraduate nursing students from a public university in São Paulo state, Brazil, were organized: a case group (used the Web site) and a control group (did not use the Web site). Data were collected from 2003 to 2005 after approval by the Research Ethics Committee. Results showed no significant difference in motivation or knowledge acquisition. A similar performance for the two groups was also verified. Other aspects observed were difficulty in doing the nursing staff scheduling exercise and the students' acknowledgment of the topic's importance for their training and professional lives; easy access was considered to be a positive aspect for maintaining the Web site.