Consciousness Flashcards
Schneider and shiffrin
Used their research to look at higher level processes that depend on consciousness eg research on understanding conditions under which automatic vs controlled processes operate ie conscious vs non conscious.
What did baars say
It is a challenging area
One way to understand it is to contrast conscious and unconscious cognition and use the differences between them to give an insight into consciousness
What does it mean cognitive correlations of consciousness?
For exams processes such as selective attention are correlated with conscious awareness of stimuli however this does not help us if fully understanding conscious experiences but do help to gain an insight into the role of consciousness in cognition for example integrating information from different modules and making them available across the cognitive system
Definition of consciousness
A feeling of control over our thoughts and behaviour
James said the continuous nature of conscious experience - “stream of consciousness” awareness of ourself and the environment but unaware of use things like sensory input.
Question is it a single thing or many things
Block
Consciousness of things in order to understand
Argues there are two aspects to it
Access consciousness, how we name something when we are conscious of it and remember it decide what to do with it we can talk about memories and what we have said we have access to it, he argues that psychology only looks at this side of it
Phenomenal consciousness the experiential aspects of consciousness
Chalmers
Makes a distinction between ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems of consciousness
Looks at the problem of how the information is shared between modular neural and cognitive systems
Attention, perception etc are easy parts
Hard things are how the consciousness processes things like vision and memory
Levine
Argues there is an explanatory gap between cognitive basis and the explanation of the phenomenology
There seems to be nothing in cognitive /neural processes that demand they are accompanied by certain experiances. Even if we did know everything about vision Can we really understand why it feels the way it does when we look at red?
The three main arguments from a philosophical approach
Perhaps the reason the cognitive / neural has a gap it because they are separate things
Phenomenal quality - interactions between neurons just coz you imagine a black hot coffe doesn’t turn a part of your brain warm or hot
Intentional - hard to see how the brain states can be about things like mental states - we have to desire something when you desire, you desire something!
Spatial position - neurons are physically located in space but mental entities like beliefs and images do not have spatial positions
Dualism
Philosophical approach
Descarters solve the mind body problem by arguing the mind and body are completely separate
There are strong objections to this though for example how would a separate mind and brain interact to guide actions unless thought has a physical aspect to it?
Monism
Philosophical approach
means materials, the idea that consciousness is part of the physical brain, so how do they deal with the explanatory gap? say its coz we use non scientific ways like desire and belief should use neuro scientific ways
The role of consciousness in cognitive psychology
Consciousness is seen as a variable in cognition eg memory research - the contrast between explicit (conscious) and implicit (non conscious) processing/learning
now it is seen as a variable in psychology meanly in learning and memory
functionalists
Philosophical approach
it is at the heart of much cognitive psychology as look at mental functions without to much ref to brain biology
similar to monisms in lots of ways but say mental states are functional or casual states defines by inputs and outputs so conscious states are not just by products of brain states, they cause our behaviour
functionalism computer analogy
the brain is the hardware - silicon chips and wires
the mind is computer software sp the mind runs in the physical brain like word processing on a computer
strong AI - the mind could be implemented in something else other than a human brain
marcel
says psychology needs to investigate consciousness as it makes mental life interesting and legitimate
Banks
says psychologists are still tiptoeing around consciousness as they do not try to fully explain what consciousness is.
why look at things like implicit cognition and learning
Because it helps us to define consciousness better by contrasting it with the unconscious
what is implicit memory
it is memory without any accompanying sensation of remembering e.g. word stem completion task, these measure memory without asking participants to recall/remember specific stimuli.
Eich
Example of implicit memory in absence of explicit memory. gave the participants presentation of words in certain context. word pairs - one of which is less common homophone (it sounded like another word but a different meaning Pane/pain)
conditions were given distraction type task so not attend words. memory for the homophones was tested -recognition tests listen to them and then say them -results - participants do not directly recognise the homophones they had been played but when the homo has ben read out and participants asked to spell them they were biased towards primed by the word pair ie the less common homo. suggests implicit memory without explicit memory is possible
Jacoby et al
example of implicit memory
false fame effect- had to say if the names belonged to famous ppl, p’s read 40 non-famous names. 10 mixed with 10 new non-famous names and a recognition test carried out
remaining 30 mixed with 30 new non famous names PLUS 60 famous names. P’s told that the original names were all non famous. fame judgement task carried out in full and divided attention conditions
In divided attention condition, P’s more likely to judge non famous names as famous - feeling of familiarity at work here. however no explicit recognition of names found. in absence of conscious recognition familiar names were assumed to b famous.
squire and Mckee
example of implicit memory
replicated Jacoby experiment- used amnesiacs, found that ppl with amnesia performed as well as ppl with normal memory on indirect tests of memory so dispite impared explicit memory they almost had normal implicit memory.- shows have the potential to learn new info even if explicit men is damaged- important as led to errorless learning
what is implicit memory like
priming - is the improvement in performance caused by previous exposure to the target stimuli
Meyer and schvaneveldt
Implicit memory
showed that participants decided more quickly that pairs of letter strings were two real words when they were related words eg doctor, nurse then unrelated eg doctor cabbage
memory and consciousness???
Memory and consciousness appear correlated but direction of causation is unclear
Bargh et al
found that words can affect behaviour- “elderly” words used in a word test primes “elderly” behaviour - P’s exposed to these words left the lab more slowly - argues they behaved in accordance to the stereotype they had unknowably been exposed to
