Consciousness Flashcards
PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
EXPLAINING PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS
- subjective experience
- private sensory experience “feel” (sensory qualia)/inner thoughts/feelings/action intentions
- what it’s like to be YOU
CORRELATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
- processes/representations in mind/brain associated w/phenomenal awareness (invariably/sometimes/w/consequences)>?
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
- representation of bodily self
- self = subject of experience
- sense of agency = self as owner of actions/intentions
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS
- anosognosias = not acknowledging major/frank cognitive disorders (ie. Anton’s syndrome_
- anarchic hand = loss of intention ownership awareness
- alien hand = loss of body part ownership awareness
- psychotic auditory hallucinations = loss of intention/internal speech ownership awareness (ie. FRITH (1992))
ANIMAL SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
- dubious mirror test status
- tests bodily awareness VS mirror image interpretation ability?
COGNITIVE FUNCTIONS ASSOCIATED W/AWARENESS
- no conscious access to very early sensory analysis stages (ie. pre-attentional cortical colour maps/edge orientation/movement)/late motor representation stages (joint angle changes/muscle contraction forces)
- informally encapsulated BUT…
NAIVE MODEL (WRONG!) - sensory analysis processes (unconscious) -> perception/cognitive evaluation interpretation/decision intention (conscious) -> motor control processes (unconscious)
- also SAP -> MCP via automatic reflexes (posture control/highly practiced skills) BUT…
- most in-between processes/representations = informationally encapsulated as sensory/motor processes (ie. syntactic processing/unconscious interference based on heuristics)
- numerous higher cog aspects once thought to require consciousness happen w/o awareness
SEMANTIC PROCESSING OF SUBLIMINAL WORDS VIA RESPONSE PRIMING TO VISIBLE TARGET
MARCEL (1983)
- semantic priming obtained from backward masked words w/prime duration at which presence of word cannot be discriminated
- similarly masked category priming of pictures/words/faces; must classify face gender, dif subliminal prime face of same/opposite gender facilitates/interferes
MEANING ACTIVATION VIA SUBMLIMINAL/UNATTENDED OBJECTS/EVENTS
KOUIDER & DEHAINE (2007)
- possible to find conditions (brief masked presentation) w/enough sensory input processing to activate meaning/emotional salience etc. BUT no perceptual awareness of stimulus
- specific claims = controversial as methodological difficulties (ie. establishing total prime invisibility/ruling out priming as perceptual overlap/ruling out response priming)
- unattended words outside focal attention = unnoticed/remembered BUT undergo some attenuated semantic processing (ie. GSR to shock conditioned words in unattended message)
PRIMING TO BEHAVIOUR
BARGH et al (1996)
- pps believing in large exp assembled into sentences
- words associated w/age/control words
- walking speed down corridor slower after priming w/age related words
- many similar reports, especially in social cog lit, gained public currency (ie. Thaler’s Nudge)
- BUT big replication/publisher bias (easy to get effect published; hard w/null/replica failures) problems
CAN SUBLIMINAL STIMULUS INITIATE VOLUNTARY ACTION?
- naive voluntary action model to stimulus =
sensory processes -> see stimulus (conscious) -> decide to act (conscious) -> motor processes - implies have to consciously see visual stimulus/intend to act to perform voluntary action
BLINDSIGHT
- patients w/hemianopia (^ restricted scotoma) - blindness area in visual area via cortical V1 damage - have no conscious awareness of blind region stimuli
- BUT (if forced to guess) voluntarily point at moving object in blind region + make discriminations (form/colour) better than chance
VOLUNTARY ACTIONS EVOKED VIA STIMULI OF WHICH NORMAL SS = UNAWARE
FEHRER & RAAB (1962)
- stimulus which pp doesn’t see (because of meta-contrast masking via flanking stimuli)
- can initiate intended action w/unaffected RT (relative to unmasked condition where pp sees stimulus)
AWARENESS INTENTION RELATIVE TO ACTION INITIATION
LIBET’S ERP PARADIGM (1983)
- pp raises finger when they want
- judges via noting position of rotating clock handle moment W at which action = consciously initiated
- readiness potential onset substantially precedes judged intention to act moment
- same true for briefer LRP (lateralised readiness potential) associated w/left VS right response selection
- awareness follows/caused by response selection?
AWARENESS INTENTION X ACTION INITIATION IMPLICATIONS
- none of causal chain requires awareness; consciously seeing stimulus inessential to semantic/emotional activation/action initiation
- if there is awareness, comments on intentional task-set establishment/stimulus detection/action initiation + selection after they happen, awareness DOESN’T CAUSE THEM
- SO…
intention awareness -> stimuli awareness -> meaning awareness/action selection awareness
DECISION MAKING/PROBLEM SOLVING
NISBETT & WILSON (1977)
- perceptuo-motor reactions/semantic activation = only contingently associated w/awareness
- classic important studies; make choice w/immediate debrief of why
- pp doesn’t appear to know what does/doesn’t influence decision
CHOICE BLINDNESS
JOHANSSON et al (2005/2006)
- exp shows pp two faces
- asks pp to choose preferred face; appears to pass face down to pp (slight of hand substitutes for other in some trials)
- asks pp to explain preference as they look at it
- 80% didn’t notice manipulation; happily gave reasons for wrong “choice” which cannot be differentiated w/face they DID choose on numerous measures
- pps don’t appear w/access to process/determinants of choice or would have noticed manipulation
- provide post-hoc choice rationale
INTUITIVE/UNCONSCIOUS VS CONSCIOUS THINKING
- increasing acceptance of decision making/reasoning via 2 routes: step-by-step (serial/logical/conscious) reasoning (S2) OR intuition (automatic/memory-based/unconscious) reasoning (S1)
- S1 = fast/quick & dirty/automatic heuristics SO inferior
- BUT…
DIJKSTERHUIS et al (2006) - sudden insight unconscious problem solving = slow YET effective/creative/superior as can integrate many features while S2 = limited capacity for representing multiple features; overweighed w/just a few
UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
DIJKSTERHUIS et al (2006)
- pps told they’ll receive info about 4 dif cars; should form impression of each car; then shown series of 48 displays describing 12 features for each car (ie mileage); options differ w/number of desirable/undesirable features (good VS bad mileage)
- randomly assigned to deliberation (conscious)/distraction (unconscious); told they’ll later be asked on opinion on cars
- deliberation = 3m careful thinking; distraction = 3m unrelated task (ie crossword)
- all features BUT not all cars = better after distraction
