Abstract The authors make a timely argument that the temporal profile of consciousness is an under-exploited constraint on theories of consciousness. However, the exact timing matters for the evolutionary hypothesis. A rival hypothesis is that in aquatic environments, it already had the function of representing distal objects, with a time-delay to consciousness in the 100–200ms range.
Abstract The target article draws a sharp contrast between intelligence and consciousness. We believe this contrast is premature and rests on an overly narrow characterisation of intelligence as abilities that can be exhaustively characterised as mappings from sensory inputs to behavioural outputs. Instead, we argue that the fortunes of intelligence and consciousness are interwoven more tightly...
The quality space hypothesis about conscious experience proposes that conscious sensory states are experienced in relation to other possible sensory states. For instance, the colour red is experienced as being more like orange, and less like green or blue. Recent empirical findings suggest that subjective similarity space can be explained in terms of similarities in neural activation patterns....
Humans have been shown to be capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness and how...
A step towards a theory of consciousness would be to characterize the effect of consciousness on information processing. One set of results suggests that the effect of consciousness is to interfere with computations that are optimally performed non-consciously. Another set of results suggests that conscious, system 2 processing is the home of norm-compliant computation. This is contrasted with...
Block's well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental...