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We are delighted to announce that Michael S. A. Graziano, Professor at Princeton University’s Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology and Director of the Graziano Lab (Consciousness & the Social Brain), has been elected an Academician of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (WAAC). He is recognized for proposing and systematically developing the Attention Schema Theory (AST) and for his pioneering contributions to the neural and computational mechanisms of consciousness, social cognition, and engineering pathways toward realizable artificial consciousness.
Over the years, Professor Graziano has taken the coupling between attention and consciousness as a guiding thread, building a cross-level chain of evidence from neurophysiology to computational models and engineering demonstrations: in his Oxford University Press monograph Consciousness and the Social Brain (2013), he advanced a social-brain framework that explains subjective consciousness through an “attention schema”; in Frontiers in Psychology (2015), he provided a systematic, mechanistic exposition of AST; in Frontiers in Robotics & AI (2017), he further argued for AST as a foundation for “engineered artificial consciousness”; in Progress in Neurobiology (2020), he showed through behavioral training and modeling that “attention control depends on internal models”; in PNAS (2019, 2020), together with collaborators he proposed—and demonstrated with behavioral and fMRI evidence—that humans implicitly encode others’ gaze as “force beams/implicit motion” emanating from the eyes, linking social-attention representations across key nodes such as the TPJ and MT+; and in PNAS (2021), he further demonstrated within a neural-network regime that introducing an attention schema can markedly improve endogenous attention control. Earlier, his work in Science (1994) on premotor encoding of peripersonal space laid a neurophysiological foundation for his subsequent trajectory from the space–action interface to models of social attention.
- Global Collaboration and Academic Ecosystem
Academicians of the World Academy for Artificial Consciousness hail from institutions such as Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, the French Academy of Sciences, the University of Padua, the University of Queensland, Columbia University, and the University of Exeter. Honorary Academicians come from a wide range of countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, Spain, and China. In addition, leading scientists from prominent research institutes and technology companies—such as Google, the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and ZEEKR—also participate.
- About WAAC
The World Academy for Artificial Consciousness (https://www.waac.ac/) is a global academic institution established in Paris in 2025. Its mission is to advance frontier research and international collaboration in artificial consciousness through the integration of science, technology, and philosophy. The Academy publishes open research, policy recommendations, evaluation standards, and more. The current President is Academician Yucong Duan, and the Secretary-General is Dr. Yingbo Li. The Honorary Academician List: On May 3, 2025, WAAC released its first batch of Top 100 Honorary Academicians, recognizing scholars who have made foundational or leading contributions to the theory of artificial consciousness.