An Embodied AI Approach to Measures of the Self

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Verena V. Hafner
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 402790442

What are the prerequisites for the development of an artificial self? How does it change during development and bodily changes? Are the computational models suitable for explaining properties of the self in humans? These are the questions we are currently addressing in our DFG project “Prerequisites for the development of an artificial self” within the SPP. An important aspect that was raised during our collaborations within the SPP are the ways of measuring selfhood in humans and artificial agents. This addresses questions of adaptivity and predictability for a sense of agency or a sense of control, and the effects of bodily interactions of agents with their environment. Answering these questions will also help evaluating the selfhood of different implementations of artificial intelligent agents.We will address measures of the self in this proposal in the following steps: First, we will start with a computational predictive model that allows for a basic sense of agency and body ownership presented in WP1 and implement it in different experimental setups of robot interaction. We will investigate measures of the self in two methodologically different ways: based on properties of the computational models and their instantiation in artificial agents (WP2), and based on behavioural observations inspired by variations of a sensorimotor Turing Test (WP3). Finally, in WP4 we will investigate whether the developed measures can account for testing disturbances of the self, in particular in cases where there is an imbalance between predicted and perceived information.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 2134: The active self