Organisational Transitions in Awareness: A Framework of Access, Coordination, and Regulation
Frontiers in Psychology July 29, 2026 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20339537 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that awareness is not all-or-none but emerges through identifiable organizational transitions involving access, coordination, and regulation, offering a testable framework applicable across biological and artificial systems. |
Abstract
Organisational Transitions in Awareness: A Framework of Access, Coordination, and Regulation presents a testable organisational framework for understanding awareness across biological and artificial systems. The paper distinguishes graded transitions in awareness based on the organisational capacities of access, coordination, and regulation, generating experimentally testable predictions across sleep, anaesthesia, disorders of consciousness, comparative cognition, development, and artificial intelligence. Rather than treating consciousness as an all-or-none property, the framework proposes that awareness emerges through identifiable organisational transitions, providing a common language for integrating empirical findings across disciplines while remaining compatible with multiple philosophical interpretations. This is the published version of the article in Frontiers in Psychology. Citation King, A., & Gray, D. (2026). Organisational Transitions in Awareness: A Framework of Access, Coordination, and Regulation. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1892596 Official published version. This article is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Please cite the published version using the DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1892596.