Consciousness and Cognition
February 16, 2011
Leanne K. Wilkins, Todd A. Girard, J. Allan Cheyne
57 citations
Investigation of "out-of-body experiences" (OBEs) has implications for understanding both normal bodily-self integration and its vulnerabilities. Beyond reported associations between OBEs and specific brain regions, however, there have been few investigations of neurochemical systems relevant to OBEs. Ketamine, a drug used recreationally to achieve dissociative experiences, provides a...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Vince Polito, Robyn Langdon, Jac Brown
31 citations
Much attention has been paid recently to the role of anomalous experiences in the aetiology of certain types of psychopathology, e.g. in the formation of delusions. We examine, instead, the top-down influence of pre-existing beliefs and affective factors in shaping an individual's characterisation of anomalous sensory experiences. Specifically we investigated the effects of paranormal beliefs...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Zoran Josipovic
The great variety of meditation techniques found in different contemplative traditions presents a challenge when attempting to create taxonomies based on the constructs of contemporary cognitive sciences. In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Travis and Shear add 'automatic self-transcending' to the previously proposed categories of 'focused attention' and 'open monitoring', and...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Félix-Antoine Lusignan, Roger Godbout, Marie-Josée Dubuc et al.
This study examined the laboratory dream content reported by 14 patients with schizophrenia and 15 controls, with a focus on reports obtained from NonREM sleep. Both the controls' and patients' frequency of dream recall following awakenings from NonREM and REM sleep were similar to values reported for healthy participants. Patients' NonREM sleep narratives were shorter than those from controls....
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2010
Antonino Raffone, Martina Pantani
51 citations
Both the global workspace theory and Block's distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, are central in the current debates about consciousness and the neural correlates of consciousness. In this article, a unifying global workspace model for phenomenal and access consciousness is proposed. In the model, recurrent neural interactions take place in distinct yet interacting access...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2009
John Beeckmans
1 citation
It has been suggested (Block, 2007) that the core neural bases for visual phenomenal consciousness and for access consciousness are located in anatomically separate regions. If this is correct, and if, as Block suggests, the core neural substrate of visual phenomenality is located early in the visual cortex where detailed chromatic information is available, then it would be reasonable to infer...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2009
Nirit Soffer-Dudek, Golan Shahar
Sleep-related experiences [Watson, D. (2001). Dissociations of the night: Individual differences in sleep-related experiences and their relation to dissociation and schizotypy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 526-535] refer to a host of nocturnal altered-consciousness phenomena, including narcoleptic tendencies, nightmares, problem-solving dreams, waking dreams, and lucid dreams. In an...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2009
Vincent De Gardelle, Jérôme Sackur, Sid Kouider
We often feel that our perceptual experience is richer than what we can express. For instance, when flashed with a large set of letters, we feel that we can see them all, while we can report only a few. However, the nature of this subjective impression remains highly debated: while many favour a dissociation between two forms of consciousness (access vs. phenomenal consciousness), others...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2009
Michael Snodgrass, Natasha Kalaida, E Samuel Winer
28 citations
Access can either be first-order or second-order. First order access concerns whether contents achieve representation in phenomenal consciousness at all; second-order access concerns whether phenomenally conscious contents are selected for metacognitive, higher order processing by reflective consciousness. When the optional and flexible nature of second-order access is kept in mind, there...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2009
Elizabeth Irvine
10 citations
Block [Block, N. (2005). Two neural correlates of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 46-52] and Snodgrass (2006) claim that a signal detection theory (SDT) analysis of qualitative difference paradigms, in particular the exclusion failure paradigm, reveals cases of phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. This claim is unwarranted on several grounds. First, partial...
Consciousness and Cognition
April 5, 2009
Jakob Hohwy
164 citations
It appears that consciousness science is progressing soundly, in particular in its search for the neural correlates of consciousness. There are two main approaches to this search, one is content-based (focusing on the contrast between conscious perception of, e.g., faces vs. houses), the other is state-based (focusing on overall conscious states, e.g., the contrast between dreamless sleep vs....
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2009
Elizabeth Schier
11 citations
This paper examines the possibility of finding evidence that phenomenal consciousness is independent of access. The suggestion reviewed is that we should look for isomorphisms between phenomenal and neural activation spaces. It is argued that the fact that phenomenal spaces are mapped via verbal report is no problem for this methodology. The fact that activation and phenomenal space are mapped...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2008
George A. Mashour, Eric LaRock
Philosophical (p-) zombies are constructs that possess all of the behavioral features and responses of a sentient human being, yet are not conscious. P-zombies are intimately linked to the hard problem of consciousness and have been invoked as arguments against physicalist approaches. But what if we were to invert the characteristics of p-zombies? Such an inverse (i-) zombie would possess all...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2008
David Gamez
This paper is a review of the work that has been carried out on machine consciousness. A clear overview of this diverse field is achieved by breaking machine consciousness down into four different areas, which are used to understand its aims, discuss its relationship with other subjects and outline the work that has been carried out so far. The criticisms that have been made against machine...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2007
Allan Hobson, David Kahn
Dream reports were collected from normal subjects in an effort to determine the degree to which dream reports can be used to identify individual dreamers. Judges were asked to group the reports by their authors. The judges scored the reports correctly at chance levels. This finding indicated that dreams may be at least as much like each other as they are the signature of individual dreamers....
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2007
Claire Petitmengin, Vincent Navarro, Michel Le van Quyen
123 citations
The purpose of this paper is to show through the concrete example of epileptic seizure anticipation how neuro-dynamic analysis (using new mathematical tools to detect the dynamic structure of the neuro-electric activity of the brain) and "pheno-dynamic" analysis (using new interview techniques to detect the pre-reflective dynamic micro-structure of the corresponding subjective experience) may...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2006
Rocco J. Gennaro, Douglas J Herrmann, Michael Sarapata
We argue that analyzing everyday memory failures in terms of the "unity of consciousness" can elucidate the bases of such failures. A perfect unity amongst one's mental states is rare. In extreme cases the unity of consciousness can breakdown in dramatic fashion (e.g., in Dissociative Identity Disorder), but such breakdowns also occur in less dramatic ways that affect us in everyday life. For...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2006
Murray Shanahan
This paper proposes a brain-inspired cognitive architecture that incorporates approximations to the concepts of consciousness, imagination, and emotion. To emulate the empirically established cognitive efficacy of conscious as opposed to non-conscious information processing in the mammalian brain, the architecture adopts a model of information flow from global workspace theory. Cognitive...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2005
Katja Valli, Antti Revonsuo, Outi Pälkäs et al.
The threat simulation theory of dreaming (TST) () states that dream consciousness is essentially an ancient biological defence mechanism, evolutionarily selected for its capacity to repeatedly simulate threatening events. Threat simulation during dreaming rehearses the cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and threat avoidance, leading to increased probability of...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2004
This article sketches an idealized strategy for the identification of neural correlates of consciousness. The proposed strategy is based on a state space approach originating from the analysis of dynamical systems. The article then focuses on one constituent of consciousness, phenomenal awareness. Several rudimentary requirements for the identification of neural correlates of phenomenal...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2004
Dennis J L G Schutter, Jack Van Honk
Recent accounts on the global workspace theory suggest that consciousness involves transient formations of functional connections in thalamo-cortico-cortical networks. The level of connectivity in these networks is argued to determine the state of consciousness. Emotions are suggested to play a role in shaping consciousness, but their involvement in the global workspace theory remains elusive....
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2004
L Andrew Coward, Ron Sun
20 citations
In the physical sciences a rigorous theory is a hierarchy of descriptions in which causal relationships between many general types of entity at a phenomenological level can be derived from causal relationships between smaller numbers of simpler entities at more detailed levels. The hierarchy of descriptions resembles the modular hierarchy created in electronic systems in order to be able to...
Consciousness and Cognition
May 19, 2003
Arne Dietrich
486 citations
It is the central hypothesis of this paper that the mental states commonly referred to as altered states of consciousness are principally due to transient prefrontal cortex deregulation. Supportive evidence from psychological and neuroscientific studies of dreaming, endurance running, meditation, daydreaming, hypnosis, and various drug-induced states is presented and integrated. It is proposed...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2003
Josef Perner, Zoltan Dienes
When do children become consciously aware of events in the world? Five possible strategies are considered for their usefulness in determining the age in question. Three of these strategies ask when children show signs of engaging in activities for which conscious awareness seems necessary in adults (verbal communication, executive control, explicit memory), and two of the strategies consider...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2002
David Rosenthal
118 citations
Ned Block's influential distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has become a staple of current discussions of consciousness. It is not often noted, however, that his distinction tacitly embodies unargued theoretical assumptions that favor some theoretical treatments at the expense of others. This is equally so for his less widely discussed distinction between phenomenal...