consciousness Flashcards
What is self consciousness?
Representation of the bodily self, subject of experiences of as the owner of actions and intentions (sense of agency)
What is the Mary colour thought experiment and how does it relate to consciousness?
knowledge about the physical properties of the universe could not prepare her for the sensation of seeing red when she saw the colour for the first time.
What are the correlates of consciousness?
The kind of processes associated with phenomenal awareness
What are some examples of neuropsychological disorders of self consciousness?
anosognosias - not acknowledging major cognitive disorders (don’t believe they’re blind)
Anarchic hand (loss of awareness of ownership of intentions)
Psychotic auditory hallucinations- loss of awareness of intention/ownership
Phantom limb syndrome
How has self consciousness been investigated in animals?
the mirror test- does it test bodily self awareness or just their ability to interpret mirror images? Red dot on face- if animal tried to rub paint of face, this was taken as evidence that the animal knows it is not part of itself however this was criticised e.g. dogs don’t pass this test yet that does not mean they don’t have conscious awareness
What is the Naïve model of consciousness?
Sensory analysis + processes (unconscious) -> perception, cognitive evaluation, interpretation, decision, intention -> motor control processes (unconscious)
What in between processes and representations are also unconscious as sensory and motor processes?
syntactic processing, unconscious inference based on heuristics etc. numerous aspects of ‘higher’ cognition that we would have once thought of as requiring consciousness can happen without awareness e.g. subliminal priming and activation of a word meaning
What does research into blindsight patients suggest about conscious awareness?
Shows you do not have to have conscious awareness for an action to be determined by something. Study of voluntary actions evoked by stimuli- shown same stimulus but one condition the subject saw onset and in the other they did not- stimulus the ppt doesn’t see can initiate an intended action with reaction time unaffected.
What is Libet’s (1983) ERP paradigm of awareness?
Watch the spinning dot and click the button whenever you feel the urge to click- readiness potential builds up (unconscious) before the conscious urge to click.
It has been found that there is a readiness potential even if there is an absence of a motor act if a person expects something to happen.
Preceding events that are perhaps not conscious- although this does not mean the event is not causal. The unconscious guides us.
What are the three main theories of consciousness?
Global workspace theory- Dehaene, Integrating Information theory and the quantum theory of consciousness
What is change blindness?
brief blank frame between two frames which produces transients all over the visual field so attention is no longer automatically attracted to the region of change.
What interpretations of change blindness can we draw?
Representation of objects in the visual field after display offset is v short lived and unstable- sensory memory unless fixed by focal attention, which creates visual STM. VSTM apparently encodes the location and appearance of only v few recently attended objects.
