Inner Speech: A Mechanism for Self-coordinating Decision Making Processes in Robotics

The experience of inner speech is a common one for humans, playing a relevant role in generating spontaneous responses to the context but also in regulating how we think and behave. Intimately tied to our sense of self, the inner speech provides, via a mechanism of internalization, a running monologue of thoughts. This monologue plays a basic role in relevant aspects related, for instance, with our ability for structuring, regulating, and shaping our activities. In this paper, we emphasize this specific aspect of the inner speech and run some examples in the CORTEX software architecture, where semantic tokens (words and sentences) are employed not only for internalizing the world but also for regulating the decision making activities.