Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2001
J G Taylor
49 citations
A missing ingredient called 'perspectivalness' is proposed as necessary for consciousness to arise from neural activity, alongside temporal duration and information content. This component guides the formation of a 'Central Representation' present in all mammals and extended in humans to support both phenomenal and self-consciousness. Experimental evidence links perspectivalness to buffer working memory sites in the inferior parietal lobes, which act as attentional coordinators on spatial maps. The article reviews difficulties among existing approaches to consciousness and discusses open questions.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2019
Anco Peeters, Miguel Segundo-Ortin
48 citations
The memory palace technique is powerful for remembering but poorly understood and difficult to use. Virtual reality devices have been proposed as a solution but have not yet delivered. An embodied, enactive approach to memory better explains why the technique works than traditional information-processing accounts. The authors offer design recommendations for a virtual memory palace, addressing both the theoretical gap and practical challenges.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2012
Keith Frankish
47 citations
The paper argues that the concept of 'diet qualia'—a watered-down version of classic qualia that strips away their intrinsic, ineffable, and subjective properties—has no distinctive content. Classic qualia are traditionally understood as intrinsic, ineffable, and subjective features of experience. The author contends that once these properties are removed, nothing phenomenal remains to be explained. Therefore, if one rejects classic qualia realism, the only thing left to explain is our disposition to judge that experiences have classic qualia—what the author calls 'zero' qualia. The paper concludes that diet qualia should be abandoned, following Dennett's suggestion to 'quine' them.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 19, 2017
Lauren E. Moore, Bruce Greyson
46 citations
Memories of near-death experiences are recalled as more vivid and detailed than memories of actual real events or imagined events. In a study of 122 people who had a near-death experience, participants rated their memory of that experience higher on a standard memory questionnaire than their memory of a real event that happened around the same time, which in turn was rated higher than a memory of an imagined event. The findings suggest that near-death experiences are not remembered as imagined or dreamlike but as even more real than everyday experiences.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2019
Oussama Abdoun, Jelle Zorn, Stefano Poletti et al.
44 citations
A meditation training protocol helped novices accurately describe their mental states during two types of meditation: focused attention and open monitoring. After several weeks of daily practice, participants' self-reported ratings of their experience (i) differed between the two meditation states, (ii) reflected how much they had practiced and how tired they felt, and (iii) matched changes in their reaction times during a task. These patterns were better explained by features of daily practice than by a tendency to give socially desirable answers. The results suggest that novice practitioners can reliably report their inner experience, supporting further study of this training approach.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 26, 2019
R. Prentner
43 citations
Conscious inner life is structured, and a key feature is the unity of consciousness. This work makes precise three features of experience related to unity: environmental embedding, mutual constraint between local and global representations, and top-down object formation. A formal model is introduced based on phenomenal space, defined by quasi-elementary and extended entities, using mereological and topological concepts and a projector-based calculus to capture its dynamical structure. This approach addresses the mind-matter problem by relating environmentally embedded agents to topologically defined objects from decompositions of phenomenal space. The authors suggest consciousness involves a series of transitions between structured layers of experience rather than a single brain-to-mind transition.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2017
Peter Carruthers, Bénédicte Veillet
43 citations
The paper revisits the debate about cognitive phenomenology, elaborating and defending a proposal that the test for irreducible phenomenology is the presence of explanatory gaps. It argues that the debate should be aligned between non-conceptual and conceptual or propositional phenomenology, rather than between sensory and cognitive phenomenology. The authors defend three varieties of non-sensory, non-conceptual phenomenology: valence, a sense of approximate number, and a sense of elapsed time.
Consciousness and Cognition
May 1, 2014
Han-Gue Jo, Marc Wittmann, Tilmann Lhündrup Borghardt et al.
43 citations
A neurophenomenological study with a single expert meditator shows that a larger readiness potential (RP) is linked to more frequent self-initiated movements during negative deflections of slow cortical potentials (SCP). These negative deflections occur alongside an inner impulse reported by the meditator, which may lead to a voluntary act. This proof-of-principle demonstrates that combining first-person introspective data with neural signal analysis can advance understanding of the neural basis of voluntary acts, challenging interpretations of the classic Libet experiment.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2017
Jaan Aru, Talis Bachmann
42 citations
Conscious experience depends on attention and expectation, but some argue it can occur without attention. Experiments on iconic memory (IM) are often cited as evidence for attention-independent consciousness. A prior study found that when attention is diverted from an IM letter display, people fail to notice missing letters. This work replicates and extends that finding by measuring subjective visibility and testing post-cue effects. Results show that participants who do not realize letters are absent perceive illusory letters, indicating phenomenal consciousness persists even without attention. Expectation generates illusory content that overwrites valid IM content, suggesting this experimental paradigm cannot reliably assess iconic memory content.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2013
Louis Sass, Elizabeth Pienkos, Barnaby Nelson
42 citations
Comparing anomalous self-experiences common in schizophrenia with those of normal individuals in an intensely introspective orientation reveals significant similarities but also important differences. Affinities include feelings of passivity, fading of self or world, and alienation from thoughts, feelings, or the lived-body. Differences involve confusion between self and world and severe dislocation or erosion of first-person perspective, qualities unique to schizophrenia. The comparison places putatively schizophrenic self-disorders in a broader context, evaluates hypotheses about core processes in schizophrenia, and orients investigation of pathogenetic pathways and psychotherapeutic interventions.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2020
Andrew A Fingelkurts, Alexander A Fingelkurts, Tarja Kallio-Tamminen
41 citations
Altering the sense of self through mental manipulation in experienced meditators causes corresponding changes in the brain's self-referential network (SRN). Participants induced states of increased or decreased witnessing agency, body-emotional agency, or narrative agency while EEG recorded their brain activity. The results strengthen evidence for a direct causal link between three specific aspects of subjective selfhood and three corresponding modules of the SRN. A new integrative model of dynamic interrelations among these SRN modules is proposed.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2017
Madeleine Ransom, Sina Fazelpour, Christopher Mole
38 citations
A prominent theory holds that cognition works by minimizing prediction errors through Bayesian inference, with attention understood as optimizing the precision of those error signals. While this account explains many attention-related phenomena, it fails to accommodate certain forms of voluntary attention. The authors argue that advocates of Bayesian prediction error minimization have overreached by claiming it is all the brain ever does, and that the theory's tools, though powerful, are insufficient for a complete explanation of attention.
Consciousness and Cognition
July 1, 2014
Michael J. Mackenzie, Linda E. Carlson, David M Paskevich et al.
38 citations
A single yoga session for female cancer survivors was linked to steady increases in focused attention and positive mood, while changes in heart activity matched the intensity of each yoga sequence. Shifts in attention and mood were predicted by concurrent cardiac activity. Participants reported that awareness of breathing, physical movement, and increased relaxation were possible reasons for yoga's benefits. Yoga may work mainly as a meditative method for regulating attention and affect, distinct from exercise or relaxation alone.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2018
Peter Carruthers
37 citations
If a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is correct and fully reductive, then questions about consciousness in nonhuman animals should be abandoned—not because they are too difficult, but because there are no substantive facts to discover. The argument hinges on the idea that global broadcasting is all-or-nothing in humans but framed in terms that imply gradations across species, yet the concept of phenomenal consciousness does not permit mental states to be conscious to some degree. The paper first displays some virtues of global workspace theory to motivate the discussion.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2015
Berit Brogaard
37 citations
People with type 2 blindsight, caused by damage to the primary visual cortex (V1), have some residual visual awareness, but their experience lacks three features often considered essential to ordinary vision: particularity (being directed at specific objects), transparency (the sense of seeing through to the world), and fine-grainedness (detailed sensory content). This case challenges the view that these characteristics are necessary for veridical visual experience and undermines the idea that visual experience is fundamentally a perceptual relation to external objects. The paper also argues that type 2 blindsight reveals how attentional modulation affects perceptual content, and that such modulation does not conflict with the claim that the phenomenology of visual experience arises from its content.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Abigail Stocks, Michelle Carr, Remington Mallett et al.
33 citations
Higher levels of lucidity during dreaming are associated with more positive dream content and a more positive mood the following day. Twenty participants completed a week-long online dream diary after practicing lucid dream induction techniques. The study found no link between lucidity and subjective sleep quality. The findings suggest that cultivating lucid dreams may help improve waking mood, though longer-term studies are needed.
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Vince Polito, Robyn Langdon, Jac Brown
31 citations
Pre-existing beliefs and emotional traits shape how people interpret unusual sensory experiences. In a study of 55 participants who took part in an unfamiliar shamanic sweat lodge ceremony, those who held paranormal beliefs aligned with shamanic mythology and those who had difficulty identifying their own feelings reported more positive aspects of the altered state of consciousness. The findings indicate that an individual's characterization of anomalous experiences is nuanced by their prior beliefs and affective factors.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2022
Leonard Dung
30 citations
A list of eight criteria is developed to evaluate tests for animal consciousness, addressing the challenge that many proposed behavioral and cognitive tests lack clear validity. The criteria are based on analogies between human and non-human behavior, theories of consciousness, and methods from human consciousness science. Tests that satisfy more of these criteria provide stronger evidence of consciousness, and future tests can be designed to meet them to increase evidential strength.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 1999
J Smythies
29 citations
Consciousness is examined through introspection and brain lesion studies, including cortical blindness, agnosia, and blindsight, alongside recovery of sight after injury. Two perception theories—Direct Realism and the Representative Theory—are discussed, covering the body-image, phantom limbs, phenomenal space, the homunculus argument, topographic coding, and the stimulus versus visual field distinction. Two brain-mind theories—Identity Theory and Bohr-Heisenberg complementarity—are compared. Binocular rivalry from intermittent photic stimulation in one eye, used in animal unit recording experiments, is proposed as a method to investigate the binding problem.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2009
Michael Snodgrass, Natasha Kalaida, E Samuel Winer
28 citations
Conscious access can be divided into two types: first-order access, where content becomes phenomenally conscious, and second-order access, where that conscious content is selected for higher-order reflective processing. When second-order access is understood as optional and flexible, there are strong reasons to believe that stimuli can be phenomenally conscious without being accessed in this second-order way. The partial access argument against this view fails because exclusion failure is due to lack of second-order access, not insufficient conscious information. The enable account better fits qualitative differences and subjective report and is simpler than the alternative. Second-order access arguably reflects the core meaning of access generally.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2020
Nick Brancazio, Miguel Segundo-Ortin
27 citations
Non-representational approaches to cognition, such as ecological-enactivism, have difficulty explaining long-term planning without invoking mental representations. Recent ecological-enactivist proposals attempt to account for such high-level capacities, but they overlook the role of long-term intentions in action coordination and perception. Drawing on enactive theories of language, the authors argue for a non-representational conception of intentions: rather than being actual cognitive entities, intentions are taken up as a practice through linguistically scaffolded attitudes. They introduce the skill of distal engagement to explain how present actions are coordinated toward distant goals without relying on representations.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2020
Abigail C. Wright, Barnaby Nelson, David Fowler et al.
26 citations
Auditory perceptual biases, such as a tendency to hear things differently, are linked to anomalous self-experiences, especially feeling alienated from one's surroundings and emotional numbing, in people with first episode psychosis and healthy controls. No link was found between metacognitive efficiency and anomalous experiences. The findings support the minimal self-disturbance model of schizophrenia spectrum vulnerability, particularly the idea of hyperreflexivity.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2017
Tomáš Marvan, Michal Polák
26 citations
Most consciousness theorists agree that a mental state cannot have a phenomenal character (what it feels like) without being conscious. This paper challenges that consensus by distinguishing two models. The unitary model treats the production of a phenomenal quality and its becoming conscious as a single process. The dual model, which the authors advocate, separates the formation of the phenomenal quality from the process that makes it conscious. They present conceptual, methodological, neuropsychological, and neural arguments that together support the dual model and the idea of unconscious mental qualities. The dual view is proposed as a hypothesis worth further investigation.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2021
J E Malinowski, D Scheel, M Mccloskey
25 citations
Dreaming is hard to study in non-human animals because it is usually identified through verbal reports. Parallels between human dreaming—its phenomenology, physiology, and behaviors—offer a way forward. Three alternative measures of human dreaming (neural correlates, memory replay, and dream-enacting behaviors) can be applied to animals. Mammals and birds, with brains similar to humans, are good models for neural and memory measures. Cephalopods, especially octopuses, may be especially suitable for studying dream-enacting behaviors.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Claudia Picard-Deland, Maude Pastor, Elizaveta Solomonova et al.
25 citations
Flying dreams, though common, rarely occur. In a study with 137 participants, a virtual reality flying task followed by a morning nap increased reports of flying dreams during the nap and the following morning, compared to baseline rates and a control group. These dreams also showed greater lucid control and emotional intensity. Prior dream-flying experience and the level of VR sensory immersion influenced induction. The results support a vection-based explanation of dream-flying and could aid in developing dream flight-induction technologies.