Awareness improves problem-solving performance
  The brain's self-monitoring of activities, including internal activities -- a
functionality that we refer to as awareness -- has been suggested as a key
element of consciousness. Here we investigate whether the presence of an
inner-eye-like process (monitor) that supervises the activities of a number of
subsystems (operative agents) engaged in the solution of a problem can improve
the problem-solving efficiency of the system. The problem is to find the global
maximum of a NK fitness landscape and the performance is measured by the time
required to find that maximum. The operative agents explore blindly the fitness
landscape and the monitor provides them with feedback on the quality (fitness)
of the proposed solutions. This feedback is then used by the operative agents
to bias their searches towards the fittest regions of the landscape. We find
that a weak feedback between the monitor and the operative agents improves the
performance of the system, regardless of the difficulty of the problem, which
is gauged by the number of local maxima in the landscape. For easy problems
(i.e., landscapes without local maxima), the performance improves monotonically
as the feedback strength increases, but for difficult problems, there is an
optimal value of the feedback strength beyond which the system performance
degrades very rapidly.
