Consciousness Flashcards
What is consciousness?
Basic notion = having subjective experiences (percepts, thoughts, dreams, imagery)
Consciousness disappears in general anaesthesia, coma and certain sleep stages.
Emerges out of complex system of brain as a collection of neurons
What are Steve Pinker’s Categories?
- Self-Knowledge
- Access to Information
- Sentience
What is self-knowledge
The feeling of “I”, the perception of being oneself. No more mysterious than any other perceptual process
What is Access to Information?
The ability to report on the content of mental experience without awareness of the neural processes that built up the content
1. Conscious Processing
2. Unconscious Processing
What is Sentience?
The subjective experience of phenomenal awareness. What is it like to be something. Qualia. The hard problem
What is the difference between conscious and unconscious processing?
Most of what goes on in the brain is unconscious. We are aware of content of mental life, but not the processes which generate the content
What is visual binding?
Features are processed in separate retinotopic maps in the visual cortex, but perception is integrated
What is Blindisght?
Patients with lesion in visual cortex can respond to visual stimuli in the blind part of the visual field, without being conscious of the stimulus
Give an example of Blindsight:
Weiskrantz (1974, 1986) - suggested subcortical networkd & interhemispheric connections underlie blindsight: the visual stimulus is being represented in other parts of the brain than in the visual cortex
What is Subliminal Perception?
Visual information presented so briefly that the subject is unaware of it; yet information biases the processing of subsequent stimuli
Give an example of Subliminal Processing:
Anthony Marcel (1983) - 50-ms photo of bicycle followed by masker: participant not aware of the photo but will complete word stem “bi” with “cycle” - hard to replicate
What is the “Scaffolding-to-Storage Framework”?
- Conscious processing is used during practise while developing complex skills. When a skill becomes automatic it no longer requires conscious processing.
- Consciousness improves efficiency of processing by moving it into the unconscious realm
Give an example of the Scaffolding-to-Storage Framework
Petersen et al., (1998) - Verbal task (new verb learning) and motor task (maze tracing). Seeing which areas of the brain are activated as the tasks are practiced
Who invented the Free Will Experiments?
Libet et al., (1983)
What were Libet’s Free Will Experiments?
- Subjects instructed to press a button freely.
- The time of intention to press was estimated by asking participant after experiment
- Readiness potential starts 350ms before the participant becomes aware of the intention to press the button
- Free will is an illusion, at least in this experimental setup
- (Replicated in fMRI by Soon et al., (2008): Action is predicted 8s before awareness to act)
