Behavioral and Brain Sciences
December 1, 2000
Stephen LaBerge
54 citations
Lucid dreaming shows that loss of self-reflective awareness is not necessary for dreaming, challenging some theories. Because lucid dreamers can remember to perform predetermined actions and signal to the laboratory, they can mark the exact time of particular dream events. This allows experiments to establish precise correlations between physiology and subjective reports and enables methodical testing of hypotheses.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
January 1, 2016
Piers D. L. Howe, Olivia Carter
26 citations
Perception can be actively shaped by top-down processes such as prior knowledge and expectations, not merely influenced by them. Two clear examples—hallucinations and mental imagery—demonstrate this, and importantly, both avoid the six confounds that Firestone and Scholl previously argued undermined claims of top-down effects on perception. This suggests that top-down influences on perception are real and not artifacts of experimental design.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
December 1, 2000
William J. Clancey
5 citations
Memory and skill learning can be understood as how categories are physically and temporally related, a process called conceptual coordination. Dreaming is a story-understanding process missing two mechanisms of everyday comprehension: conceiving sequences (chunking categories in time as higher-order categorization) and coordinating across modalities (e.g., relating a word's sound to its meaning's image). This explains isomorphisms between dream phenomenology and neurophysiology, and suggests dreaming facilitates future coordination of sequential, cross-modal categorization, with REM sleep lowering activation thresholds or 'unlearning'.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
January 1, 2016
Anil K. Seth
4 citations
Consciousness may be linked to voluntary action selection, but a narrow focus on skeletomotor control overlooks how interoception and autonomic regulation contribute to conscious selfhood and subjectivity. From the perspective of predictive processing, internal 'action'—the regulation of the body's internal state—plays a crucial role in shaping conscious experience. The argument suggests that understanding consciousness requires integrating both external action selection and internal bodily regulation.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
March 1, 1997
Bruce Mangan
2 citations
Block's distinction between phenomenal consciousness (P) and access consciousness (A) mixes a logical distinction with an empirical claim. The logical usefulness of the P/A distinction does not make it plausible as an empirical thesis that two kinds of consciousness actually exist. It is unclear whether the P/A distinction offers any advantage over assuming a single kind of consciousness. One of Block's analogies—comparing P to liquid in a hydraulic computer—can help clarify the idea of consciousness as cognitive hardware.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
January 1, 2022
W. Tecumseh Fitch
Consciousness may serve a core function by globally feeding back information about actions that were actually executed, thereby supporting local learning through neuronal updating. Brains operate as parallel systems that compute possible actions and predict outcomes. This hypothesis addresses critiques about the evolutionary function of consciousness by proposing that consciousness per se plays a specific role in providing feedback on executed actions, which aids in adjusting and refining neural processes for learning.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
January 1, 2016
Helene Sophrin Porte
Consciousness in dreams serves the same function as waking consciousness: adaptive voluntary action. The article examines how dream contents enter the conscious field and what properties dream consciousness has, building on Morsella et al.'s theory that consciousness is for guiding voluntary behavior. It raises two prior questions: the mechanism by which contents become conscious during dreams and the distinctive features of dream consciousness itself.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
February 1, 2007
Anton M. L. Coenen
Merker argues that the thalamocortical system is not essential for consciousness; instead, the midbrain reticular system is responsible for consciousness when defined as the waking state. However, when consciousness is considered as phenomenal consciousness, which requires experience and perception, the thalamocortical system appears indispensable.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
December 1, 2006
Ilkka Pyysiäinen
Meditation is better understood as ritualized action that occupies working memory rather than as a technique for emptying the mind, a common assumption in religious studies. Boyer and Lienard's theory of ritualized action as 'swamping' working memory may explain meditation's effects without attributing experiential goals that practitioners do not actually hold.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
October 1, 2006
Robert G. Kunzendorf
Freud's explanation of uncovered incest shifted from real abuse dissociated from self-consciousness to wishes repressed from consciousness. Dissociation is preferred on theoretical and empirical grounds, as it emerges from double-aspect materialism, while repression implicates Cartesian dualism. Studies suggest that abnormal individuals dissociate trauma from self-conscious source-monitoring, convincing themselves the trauma is imaginary and re-experiencing it as an unbidden image.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
October 1, 2001
Geraint Rees, Chris Frith
O'Regan and Noë argue that a one-to-one correspondence between awareness and patterns of neural activity in the brain is impossible, making the project of identifying the neural correlates of consciousness doomed to fail. The authors of this response contend that such pessimism may be overstated, as recent empirical data show some convergence in describing consistent patterns of neural activity associated with visual consciousness.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
April 1, 2000
José Luis Bermúdez
Rolls argues that phenomenal consciousness depends on higher-order thoughts, distinguishing conscious from non-conscious states by linking them to two types of action and their neural pathways. Only actions involving higher-order thought are conscious. This theory leads to implausible implications for how stimulus-reinforcement learning works.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
April 1, 2000
Jordan B. Peterson
Consciousness is assigned the functions of reflection, planning, and error-correction, but a neuropsychologically grounded cybernetic theory offers a broader view: it constructs goals and plans, alters the valence of goal-related phenomena, registers error-signals, and explores unexpected circumstances by reconfiguring goals and plans. Consciousness also plays a fundamental ontological role, conferring the status of 'discriminable object' on select aspects of otherwise indeterminate being.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
October 1, 1999
Gerard O'Brien, Jonathan P. Opie
A critique of Dienes and Perner's theory of explicit and implicit knowledge finds that while the theory aims to organize research in cognitive psychology, it relies heavily on the Higher-Order Thought theory of consciousness, which undermines its plausibility and usefulness. The authors agree with the general strategy but argue that a consensus on the distinction remains distant.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
March 1, 1997
Joseph E. Bogen
Block's distinction between phenomenal consciousness (P) and access consciousness (A) is examined. While examples of P without A are readily recognized, the reverse—A without P—is harder to illustrate. Block proposed a hypothetical zombie, computationally identical to a human but lacking subjectivity, as an example of A without P. This description may apply to the disconnected right hemisphere of a split-brain subject, though an alternative interpretation posits two parallel mechanisms for P.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
March 1, 1997
Denise Gamble
P-consciousness (P) is an immediate fluctuating continuum of raw experiential matter, while A-consciousness (A) acts to objectify and impose form, making contents thinkable. A representationalizes P, but P itself is not representational under certain concepts of representation. Block's arguments do not establish that P is representational, and given his cognitive science assumptions, he cannot account for the phenomenal content he claims goes beyond representational content. The BBS discussion shows the need for greater analysis and justification for a representationalist thesis of P.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
June 1, 1995
D. M. Armstrong
The distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, as proposed by Block, is accepted, but his account of the distinction is challenged. Phenomenal consciousness is perceptual consciousness, involving detailed, nonverbal information about one's body and environment. Access consciousness is identified with introspection.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
June 1, 1995
Bernard J. Baars
The abstract argues that questions about consciousness—such as whether it is a single phenomenon or a collection of loosely related problems, and whether personal conscious experience is tightly linked to global cognitive access—cannot be settled by theoretical reasoning alone; they require empirical investigation. The author illustrates this by pointing to readers' own introspective experiences, such as the difference between central and peripheral vision, and the contrast between conscious and unconscious processing of a word's multiple meanings.