consciousness Flashcards
what are the 3 problems of consciousness?
- SELF conciousness - aware of bodily self, experiences and intentions
- CORRELATES of consciousness
explaining - which processes are associated with phenomenal awareness - EXPLAINING phenomenal awareness - feel of private sensory experience
what are some examples of neuropsychological disorders of self-consciousness?
anasagnosias - don’t ackowledge cognitive disorders
anarchic hand - person not responsible of movements
auditory hallucinations - lose awareness of ownership of internal speech
describe the mirror test with animals?
how is it disputed?
anaethetise animals and put dot in forehead
pass test if - if animal tries to get spot off when looking in mirror then has awareness of body and knows dot doesn’t belong
- disputed that animals just understand the concept of a mirror not that it is themselves
what does the ‘naive model’ state?
issues with this?
any cognitive function between early sensory analysis and later motor function is under conscious awareness
issue: syntactic processing is unconscious inference based on heuristics and semantic priming influencing response time
describe testing activation of meaning by subliminal or unattended objects?
possible to find conditions where enough processing of sensory input to activate meaning but no perceptual awareness of stimulus
but methodological difficulties in achieving this e.g total invisibilty of prime
e.g chicago skin response (meaning activated but no perception of word said)
study which has shown priming to behaviour?
problems with this sort of research?
people walked slower after being primed with age related words
problems with replication and publication bias
what is the naive model of voluntary reaction to a stimulus?
sensory processes to seeing stimulus and decision to act (both conscious) to motor processes
implies you have to consciously see visual stimulus and intend to act to perform a voluntary action
describe blindsight and conscious awareness of stimuli in blind region?
no conscious awareness of stimuli in blind region
can’t see moving object within blind region but much better than chance in making right discriminations even though unaware of it
what was found about voluntary actions evoked by stimuli of which normal subjects are unaware?
stimulus which the subjects claimed not to ‘see’ can initiate an intended action with RT unaffected
when does awareness of intention happen relative to intiation of action?
initiation of action in brain substantially precedes moment ‘deciding’ intention to act
awareness follows response selection (brain already selected before intention)
what are the 2 routes of decision-making and reasoning?
1) step-by-step serial logical reasoning - conscious
2) intuition - unconscious - superior when have to integrate many features due to limitation of capacity in conscious memory
how has ‘unconsicous thought advantage’ been studied?
how has this been discredited?
decisions about cars
unconscious vs conscious thought condition
made better choices after unconscious condition when 12 attributes (more features have to be integrated which is limited by capacity of conscious working memory)
but replication found results restricted to small sample sizes and attributed to publication bias
what is dualism?
to describe relationship between brain activity and conscious awareness
consciousness NOT dependent on physical substrate (brain activity) and immaterial
what is materialism?
to describe relationship between brain activity and conscious awareness
consciousness IS dependent on the physical substrate (brain activity)
scientists believe in this
what is physicalism?
problem?
1 out of 2 branches of materialism
consciousness requires certain properties and activites of neurons
vague
