Over a decade in the making and described in some seventy-five published papers, the LIDA cognitive model is comprehensive, complex, and hard to "wrap one's head around". Here we offer, in tutorial fashion, a current, relatively complete and somewhat detailed, description of the conceptual LIDA model, with pointers to more complete accounts of individual processes in the literature. These descriptions also include some features of the workings of the LIDA model that have not been published previously. The tutorial begins with several short sections designed to ease the reader into the LIDA model. These are followed by an account of the conceptual commitments of the LIDA model. We also include a brief introduction to the LIDA computational model via the LIDA Framework, with pointers to its own tutorial. This is followed by sketches of several of the LIDA based agents developed with the help of the Framework. The tutorial ends with a section on current research activity, which includes a table showing which aspects of the LIDA conceptual model have currently been implemented computationally.

Natural selection has imbued biological agents with motivations moving them to act for survival and reproduction, as well as to learn so as to support both. Artificial agents also require motivations to act in a goal-directed manner and to learn appropriately into various memories. Here we present a biologically inspired motivation system, based on feelings (including emotions) integrated within the LIDA cognitive architecture at a fundamental level. This motivational system, operating within LIDA’s cognitive cycle, provides a repertoire of motivational capacities operating over a range of time scales of increasing complexity. These include alarms, appraisal mechanisms, appetence and aversion, and deliberation and planning.

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Across various fields it is argued that the self in part consists of an autobiographical self-narrative and that the self-narrative has an impact on agential behavior. Similarly, within action theory, it is claimed that the intentional structure of coherent long-term action is divided into a hierarchy of distal, proximal, and motor intentions. However, the concrete mechanisms for how narratives and distal intentions are generated and impact action is rarely fleshed out concretely. We here demonstrate how narratives and distal intentions can be generated within cognitive agents and how they can impact agential behavior over long time scales. We integrate narratives and distal intentions into the LIDA model, and demonstrate how they can guide agential action in a manner that is consistent with the Global Workspace Theory of consciousness. This paper serves both as an addition to the LIDA cognitive architecture and an elucidation of how narratives and distal intention emerge and play their role in cognition and action

A body schema is an agent’s model of its own body that enables it to act on affordances in the environment. This paper presents a body schema system for the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent (LIDA) cognitive architecture. LIDA is a conceptual and computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory, also integrating other theories from neuroscience and psychology. This paper contends that the ‘body schema’ should be split into three separate functions based on the functional role of consciousness in Global Workspace Theory. There is (1) an online model of the agent’s effectors and effector variables (Current Body Schema), (2) a long-term, recognitional storage of embodied capacities for action and affordances (Habitual Body Schema), and (3) “dorsal” stream information feeding directly from early perception to sensorimotor processes (Online Body Schema). This paper then discusses how the LIDA model of the body schema explains several experiments in psychology and ethology.