Cognitive Foundations of Consciousness: Embodied and Computational Approaches to Awareness, Volition and Social Cognition

The study of consciousness stands at the absolute core of contemporary cognitive science. Throughout history, this phenomenon has been approached from diverse philosophical and empirical perspectives, yielding a rich but fragmented landscape of knowledge. Today, a paradigm shift is underway. Beyond unconscious specialized processing and statistical predictive mechanisms, contemporary hypotheses propose that consciousness emerges as a property of widely distributed streams of data. This distributed emergence allows complex cognitive systems to access, share, and flexibly act upon information. By framing consciousness as a global integrative mechanism, current cognitive science offers a cutting-edge explanatory framework with the potential to fundamentally drive our scientific understanding of the mind. Approaching consciousness from this perspective, as a set of interrelated processes that integrate disparate, distributed pieces of sensory information into a single, unified and coherent experience of the world enabling decision-making and social interaction, allows for operationalization, measurement and computational modeling of these complex emergence phenomena. This stance also opens a bridge across fields that have rarely been brought together around access consciousness: cognitive science, developmental science, and neuromorphic engineering.This Research Topic aims to bridge the gap between abstract theories of mind and explicit cognitive mechanisms, focusing specifically on access consciousness, the mechanisms by which cognitive systems inspect, report, and act upon information for complex behavior. Rather than revisiting general models of consciousness, we seek theoretical, empirical, and computational contributions that clarify how distributed data streams give rise to functional conscious states such as awareness, volition, reportability, and agency. We especially welcome work that traces these mechanisms across biological and artificial agents, drawing on developmental trajectories and biologically inspired architectures, building a foundation that may ultimately bring us closer to the hard problem of subjective experience.This special issue welcomes mature and cutting-edge research on access consciousness and its functional mechanisms, including cognitive and neural mechanisms of awareness, attention, and metacognition; volition, agency, and self-determination in biological and artificial agents; embodied and enactive approaches to consciousness; biologically inspired cognitive architectures (BICA); computational and predictive-processing models of conscious experience; self-other differentiation and the role of consciousness in social cognition; motivation, belonging, and affective dimensions of conscious processing; and methodological advances in operationalizing consciousness for empirical and computational research. To complement rather than duplicate existing work on purely theoretical models of consciousness, submissions should be grounded in the theoretical and empirical foundations of Cognitive Science, Developmental Science, and Neuromorphic Engineering. Proposals can take the form of original manuscripts, short communications, opinion articles, systematic reviews, and topical survey articles. Empirical studies are welcome when supported by theoretical analyses and/or computational modeling. Topic editors: Francisco Abelardo Robles Aguirre, Félix Francisco Ramos-Corchado, Daniel Madrigal Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82780/cognitive-foundations-of-consciousness-embodied-and-computational-approaches-to-awareness-volition-and-social-cognition