Frontiers in Psychology
November 10, 2021
Bernard J. Baars, Natalie Geld, Robert Kozma
In this work, we provide a brief overview of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), along with recent developments and clarifications of modern neuroscientific evidence. GWT started in the 1980s as a purely psychological theory of conscious cognition, and has become a prominent approach in scientific studies of consciousness (Mashour et al., 2020). Based on today’s far more detailed understanding of...
Cognitive Neuroscience
2021
Bernard J. Baars
Doerig et al. point out that there is now a great deal of evidence bearing directly on our understanding of consciousness. However, they argue that the multiplicity of theories suggest that we have a 'lack of stringent criteria specifying how empirical data constrains ToCs.'
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2021
Robert Kozma, Bernard J. Baars, Natalie Geld
Spatio-temporal brain activity monitored by EEG recordings in humans and other mammals has identified beta/gamma oscillations (20-80 Hz), which are self-organized into spatio-temporal structures recurring at theta/alpha rates (4-12 Hz). These structures have statistically significant correlations with sensory stimuli and reinforcement contingencies perceived by the subject. The repeated...
Front Psychol
November 10, 2015
Zoran Josipovic, Bernard J. Baars
27 citations
in science and clinical practice, although a number of issues related to their phenomenology and to experimental designs still remain
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Melanie Boly, Anil K. Seth, Melanie Wilke et al.
295 citations
This joint article reflects the authors' personal views regarding noteworthy advances in the neuroscience of consciousness in the last 10 years, and suggests what we feel may be promising future directions. It is based on a small conference at the Samoset Resort in Rockport, Maine, USA, in July of 2012, organized by the Mind Science Foundation of San Antonio, Texas. Here, we summarize recent...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin, Thomas Zoega Ramsoy
A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling elements. In computational applications, GW architectures recruit many distributed, specialized agents to cooperate in resolving focal ambiguities. In the brain, conscious experiences may reflect a GW function. For animals, the natural world is full of unpredictable dangers and...
Physics of Life Reviews
September 1, 2012
Bernard J. Baars, David B. Edelman
Natural phenomena are reducible to quantum events in principle, but quantum mechanics does not always provide the best level of analysis. The many-body problem, chaotic avalanches, materials properties, biological organisms, and weather systems are better addressed at higher levels. Animals are highly organized, goal-directed, adaptive, selectionist, information-preserving, functionally...
Frontiers in Psychology
2011
Gerald M. Edelman, Joseph A. Gally, Bernard J. Baars
198 citations
The Dynamic Core and Global Workspace hypotheses were independently put forward to provide mechanistic and biologically plausible accounts of how brains generate conscious mental content. The Dynamic Core proposes that reentrant neural activity in the thalamocortical system gives rise to conscious experience. Global Workspace reconciles the limited capacity of momentary conscious content with...
Advances in Consciousness Research
October 28, 2010
Stan Franklin, Bernard J. Baars
Unconscious processes come in two varieties, the preconscious, whose contents may become conscious, and the never-conscious, whose contents may not. In this chapter we make use of Global Workspace Theory and its LIDA model to catalogue never-conscious and preconscious processes, and offer an explanation of the functionally of the distinction. The LIDA/GWT model suggests that the functional...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
May 19, 2009
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin
149 citations
We argue that the functions of consciousness are implemented in a bio-computational manner. That is to say, the conscious as well as the non-conscious aspects of human thinking, planning, and perception are produced by adaptive, biological algorithms. We propose that machine consciousness may be produced by similar adaptive algorithms running on the machine.Global Workspace Theory is currently...
International Journal of Machine Consciousness
May 19, 2009
Stan Franklin, Sidney K. D’Mello, Bernard J. Baars et al.
22 citations
The currently leading cognitive theory of consciousness, Global Workspace Theory (Baars 1988, 2003), postulates that the primary functions of consciousness include a global broadcast serving to recruit internal resources with which to deal with the current situation and to modulate several types of learning. In addition, conscious experiences present current conditions and problems to a “self ”...
December 13, 2007
Bernard J. Baars
48 citations
This chapter contains section titled: Introduction The Central Puzzle: Conscious Limits vs. Unconscious Vastness Global Access: an Answer to the Puzzle of Limited Capacity? Global Workspace Th eory and Specific GW Models Gaps and Limits in Current Work Summary and Conclusions
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
February 1, 2006
Bernard J. Baars
5 citations
van der Velde & de Kamps make a case for neural blackboard architectures to address four questions raised by human language. Unfortunately, they neglect a sizable literature relating blackboard architectures to other fundamental cognitive questions, specifically consciousness and voluntary control. Called “global workspace theory,” this literature integrates a large body of brain and behavioral...
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
January 15, 2006
Bernard J. Baars
Abstract‘Consciousness’ operationally consists of all the things human beings report experiencing, from perception to mental images, inner speech, recalled memories, semantics, dreams, hallucinations, emotional feelings, and aspects of cognitive and motor control. In cognitive theory, consciousness appears to be a global access function, presenting an endless variety of focal contents to...
Cognition
December 1, 2005
Murray Shanahan, Bernard J. Baars
The subject of this article is the frame problem, as conceived by certain cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, notably Fodor for whom it stands as a fundamental obstacle to progress in cognitive science. The challenge is to explain the capacity of so-called informationally unencapsulated cognitive processes to deal effectively with information from potentially any cognitive domain...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2005
Bernard J. Baars, Steven Laureys
Although we admire Ned Block's effort to include cognitive neuroscience in his philosophical work, we cannot agree with his interpretation of the evidence [1xTwo neural correlates of consciousness. Block, N. Trends Cogn. Sci. 2005; 9: 46–52Abstract | Full Text | Full Text PDF | PubMed | Scopus (252)See all References[1]. Block has long argued that there are two kinds of consciousness:...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Bernard J. Baars
Global workspace (GW) theory emerged from the cognitive architecture tradition in cognitive science. Newell and co-workers were the first to show the utility of a GW or "blackboard" architecture in a distributed set of knowledge sources, which could cooperatively solve problems that no single constituent could solve alone. The empirical connection with conscious cognition was made by Baars...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2003
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin
Active components of classical working memory are conscious, but traditional theory does not account for this fact. Global Workspace theory suggests that consciousness is needed to recruit unconscious specialized networks that carry out detailed working memory functions. The IDA model provides a fine-grained analysis of this process, specifically of two classical working-memory tasks, verbal...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
2002
Bernard J. Baars
Consciousness might help to mobilize and integrate brain functions that are otherwise separate and independent. Evidence for this 'conscious access hypothesis' was described almost two decades ago, in a framework called global workspace theory. The theory had little impact at first, for three reasons: because consciousness was controversial; the evidence, though extensive, was indirect; and...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
February 1, 2001
Bernard J. Baars
20 citations
The limited capacity of immediate memory “rides” on the even more limited capacity of consciousness, which reflects the dynamic activity of the thalamocortical core of the brain. Recent views of the conscious narrow-capacity component of the brain are explored with reference to global workspace theory (Baars 1988; 1993; 1998). The radical limits of immediate memory must be explained in terms of...
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
October 1, 1997
Sung Bae Cho, Bernard J. Baars, James Newman
Considerable progress is being made in interdisciplinary efforts to develop a general theory of the neural correlates of consciousness. Developments of Baars' Global Workspace theory over the past decade are examples of this progress. Integrating experimental data and models from cognitive psychology, AI and neuroscience, we present a neurocognitive model in which consciousness is defined as a...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
June 1, 1995
Bernard J. Baars
AbstractBlock seems to propose untested answers to empirical questions. Whether consciousness is a “mongrel problem,” rather than a single core fact with many facets, is an empirical issue. Likewise, the intimate relationship between personal consciousness and global access functions cannot be decided pretheoretically. This point is demonstrated by the reader's private experience of foveal...