ArticleNeuroscience of consciousness2021
Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference.
Article in Neuroscience of consciousness, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 43 papers.
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Who cites it
43 citing papers in PubMed.
- Towards a Mathematical Structure of Global Phenomenal Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Understanding mechanisms of voluntary engagement of mental effort using active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- A Rosetta Stone hypothesis for neurophenomenology: mathematical predictions from predictive processing.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Transcendental model selection: a computational account of symbolic cognition and general intelligence through morality and culture.Frontiers in sociology · 2026Article
- Who am I? Self-inquiry as a neurophenomenological approach to consciousness.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- A Bayesian framework for happiness, health, and psychological well-being.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Learning to attenuate myself: a predictive processing account of body-scan meditation and the dissolution of bodily boundaries.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Modulation of sensory attenuation by intensive meditation practice: an active inference perspective.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Awareness of being: a computational neurophenomenological model of mindfulness, mind-wandering, and meta-attentional control.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Towards an active inference account of deep meditative deconstruction.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- From self-organizing systems to subjective temporal extension.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- From hidden springs to endless oceans: exploring the complementary roles of the amygdala and hippocampus in phenomenal experience.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Motor and operative intentionality in computational phenomenology: from shallow to deep active inference models.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Born to act: Deferred action and desire as active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Review
- Pathfinding: a neurodynamical account of intuition.Communications biology · 2025Review
- It Is Movement All the Way Down: Broken Rhythms and Embodied Selfhood in Depersonalization.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The Criticality of Consciousness: Excitatory-Inhibitory Balance and Dual Memory Systems in Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The role of affective states in computational psychiatry.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Metacognitive Feelings: A Predictive-Processing Perspective.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Thoughtseeds: A Hierarchical and Agentic Framework for Investigating Thought Dynamics in Meditative States.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Meta-awareness refers to the capacity to explicitly notice the current content of consciousness and has been identified as a key component for the successful control of cognitive states, such as the deliberate direction of attention. This paper proposes a formal model of meta-awareness and attentional control using hierarchical active inference. To do so, we cast mental action as policy selection over higher-level cognitive states and add a further hierarchical level to model meta-awareness states that modulate the expected confidence (precision) in the mapping between observations and hidden cognitive states. We simulate the example of mind-wandering and its regulation during a task involving sustained selective attention on a perceptual object. This provides a computational case study for an inferential architecture that is apt to enable the emergence of these central components of human phenomenology, namely, the ability to access and control cognitive states. We propose that this approach can be generalized to other cognitive states, and hence, this paper provides the first steps towards the development of a computational phenomenology of mental action and more broadly of our ability to monitor and control our own cognitive states. Future steps of this work will focus on fitting the model with qualitative, behavioural, and neural data.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.