  Consciousness has been hypothesized to operate as a global workspace, which
accesses and integrates multimodal information in a unified manner, supports
expectation violation monitoring and reduction, and the motivation, programming
and control of action. One important yet open issue concerns how the subjective
perspective at the core of consciousness, and subjective properties of
manifestation of the environment in such perspective as an embodied experience,
plays a role in such process. We operationalised the concept of subjective
perspective using the principles of the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM),
based on the projective geometrical concept of Field of Consciousness. We show
how these principles can account for documented relationships between appraisal
and distance as an inverse distance law, yield a generative model of affective
and epistemic drives based on purely subjective parameters, such as the
apparent size of objects, and can be generalised to implement Theory of Mind,
in a manner that is consistent with simulation theory. We used simulations of
artificial agents, based on psychological rationale, to demonstrate how
different model parameters could generate a variety of emergent adaptive and
maladaptive behaviours that are relevant to developmental and clinical
psychology: the ability to be resilient in the face of obstacles through
imaginary projections, the emergence of social approach and joint attention
behaviours, the ability to take advantage of false beliefs attributed to
others, the emergence of avoidance behaviours as observed in social anxiety
disorders, the presence of restricted interests as observed in autism spectrum
disorders. The simulation of agents was applied to a specific robotic context,
and agents' behaviours were demonstrated by controlling the corresponding
robots.
