This fits very much in my findings having written a dynamic cognition theory that sees the key to cognitive dynamics as being in getting the reinforcement learning right.

In the Salience theory of dynamic cognition I've put forward, salience (which is a descriptor for the functions performed by the emotional and autonomic centers of the brain combined) is the reason why the generalized algorithm of the neocortex (which I assert is nothing more than comparison after sensation, selection after comparison, and finally prediction on top of the selection. Salience is what is used to decide what to predict which then does or does not drive action.

I'd been refining the theory privately for a few years and only posting some tid bits to my blog but then in 2013 decided to release a post to introduce it formerly and put forward some testable hypothesis.

I assert that not only is salience the driver of dynamic cognition but it also gives rise naturally to self awareness and thus consciousness. In fact consciousness is an illusion of the constant dynamics of salience driven action modulating events caused by responses to sensory experience. Levels of consciousness only being distinguished by levels of resolution to which sensory experience can be encoded in the brain (two places determine this resolution, sensory resolution plus memory capacity).

Cognitive dynamics emerge as possible responses in the salience selection space over the k dimensions of sensory experiences that the cognition is able to perform salience driven dynamics over. In a human being the main dimensions of note are olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, visual, auditory.

Generally a control flow diagram for dynamic cognition (the minimal set required in the theory) involves 4 nodes of transformation and feedback between them.

Sensation (the organs that capture a given data set from world space... the 5 senses...etc.)

Comparison (the place where incoming sensation is compared to previous salience "tagged" sensation [memory, most immediately short term memory but also long term] and predictions are made via "selection")

Salience (the place where comparison predictions are tagged with their emotional or autonomic import factors)

Action (the final node that can remodulate sensation directly but only if a dynamic threshold determined by Salience evalution triggers it ..otherwise comparison and salience evaluation continues.

Associated important findings of the theoretical frame work for salience are that the autonomic and emotional centers are critical to get right if we are to emerge self aware cognition. The need to avoid pathological cognition is great...also the need to create cognition that cares about our needs is also important. I've put forward ideas on how this would be done in a salience based dynamic cognition.

I've compiled a chronological series of my articles on the theory compiled over the last 5 years or so.

The first post was from April of 2010, which posed the question of weather or not emotion was required as a guide for cognitive dynamics...at first I was of the mind that it could be discarded or replicated using neo cortical dynamics alone but later came to realize that emotion was not a throw away element it was a core aspect of how salience enabled selection which then drove action. This would be a major element of the salience theory pieced together over the next couple of years.

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2010/04/emotion-no-longer-has-to-be-our-guide.html

My curiosity continued to be explored in July, 2010 when I wrote the following post, which posited ideas for the reason for the development of emotions. I surmised that emotion lay at the center of the riddle of what intelligence was particularly consciousness but had no way to formerly draw a connection between the two, not yet. This post was still important because it allowed me to latch on to the idea of emotional salience to survival (as opposed to being driven by a need to serve social urges first) as being an important piece of the dynamic cognition puzzle.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2010/07/why-of-emotion-from-whence-did-it-come.html

The neuroscience was clueless to the control systems and neural network work that the machine learning and electrical engineer space had long explored. The engineers and machine learning researchers were clueless to how neurotransmitters were being used in the brain between different cognitive modules to effect processing of music, storing of memories and the big prize, how a self aware and dynamic cognitive process could emerge from the very discrete operations happening in the mind. I wrote articles on emotion and it's purpose and put forward a theory of dreams (which has since found much support in empirical research).http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2009/06/yet-another-theory-of-dreams.html

:The theory of dreams was important to the work on cognition because the fundamental question of what happened to "you" when you fell into sleep without a dream state was a core focus. I concluded that "you" only existed when actively experiencing, comparing, evaluating and doing...that there was no difference between this process and consciousness...and by December 2011, after I'd started and mostly finished the implementation of ADA and implicit AOW I wrote out the theory that salience required autonomic and emotional modulation along with memory comparison to sensory input.http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2011/12/how-does-idea-form-autonomics-memory.html

The idea that it was salience driven cognitive dynamism that led to consciousness fundamentally enabled by what I called "drive", "drive" I analyzed to have both autonomic (physical often involuntary) and emotional components. I concluded that the underlying reason for drive was irrelevant to the emergence of dynamic cognition but that the number and level of sensory dimensions was important for setting the interacting complexity of abstractions that could arise in such an emerged mind but without the emotion and autonomic modulation no dynamism of any kind would emerge...only reflex would exist.  Around this time I started looking more widely into the work of neuroscientists and came across Giovani Tonini's Integration Information theory, I was amazed by how right this generalized approach to consciousness seemed to me. However I found it had fundamental flaws in that though it did an excellent job of explaining the cognitive landscape in terms of what was called Qualia space it didn't explain how Qualia space turned into self aware agents with drive. This latter piece being answered by my ideas on salience still being formed.:The same day I wrote out a set of diagrams that detailed the cognitive cycle based on salience, the image below is taken from that sheet:<photo id="3" />http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/03/integrated-information-does-not-equate.html

:By early 2012 I'd completed the bulk of the ADA implementation and fresh with it's statistical approach on action deltas in mind realized that the problem of paranoia would be important to tackle when building a free learning intelligence that would use salience determination. If the emotional and autonomic modulations were not constrained it would be easy to build pathological minds...of the sort to make our worst Sci Fi. nightmares seem pedestrian. I talked about this fear of paranoia and explained the need for caution in approaching creating dynamic cognition that emerged self awareness (consciousness).http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2012/02/with-completion-of-ada-action-delta.html