Consciousness: converging insights from connectionist modeling and neuroscience.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences August 1, 2005 Tiago V Maia, Axel Cleeremans
Selective attention, working memory, and cognitive control arise from competition between widely distributed neural representations, biased by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex. Connectionist models implementing this competition share key features with models of global workspace theory, all relying on global constraint satisfaction. This review argues that these models are relevant for understanding consciousness.