Consciousness

Question 1

What are the problems of consciousness?

Answer 1

• explaining phenomenal awareness (subjective experience)
• correlates of consciousness
• self-consciousness is a representation of the bodily self, the self as a subject of experiences and the self as owner of actions and intentions

Question 2

What do neuropsychological disorders of self-consciousness include?

Answer 2

• anosognosias (not acknowledging major and frank cognitive disorders)
• anarchic hand (loss of awareness of ownership of intentions)
• alien hand (loss of awareness of ownership of body part)
• psychotic auditory hallucinations (loss of awareness/ownership of internal speech)

Question 3

What does research into animal’s self-consciousness show?

Answer 3

• using the mirror test where a dot is placed on them and then put in front of a mirror and see whether they remove it
• cats, dogs, young and old monkeys don’t pass
• human babies don’t pass until 18 months old but that may be due to not interpreting mirror images instead

Question 4

What cognitive functions are associated with awareness?

Answer 4

• no conscious access to early stages of sensory analysis/ late stages of motor representation
• usually think of the naive model: sensory analysis processes are unconscious, the perception and cognitive evaluation interpretation and decision and intention are conscious and the motor control processes are unconscious
• numerous aspects of higher cognition that we’d once thought require consciousness can happen without awareness
• such as semantic processing of subliminal words demonstrated by priming of response to visible targets, activation of meaning by subliminal/ unattended objects/events and priming to behaviour

Question 5

How is semantic processing of subliminal words demonstrated by priming of response to visible target?

Answer 5

• semantic priming obtained from backward-masked words with prime duration at which presence of word can’t be discriminated
• masked category priming of pictures, words, faces
• e.g. if needing to classify gender of face, a different subliminal prime face of same/opposite gender will facilitate or interfere

Question 6

How is the meaning by subliminal or unattended objects/events activated?

Answer 6

• it’s possible to find conditions where there’s enough processing of sensory input to activate meaning or emotional salience etc but no perceptual awareness of stimulus
• specific claims remain controversial because of methodological difficulties
• unattended words outside focal attention not noticed/remembered but undergo some semantic processing

Question 7

How is behaviour primed?

Answer 7

• Bargh et al (1996): participants believed they were in a language experiment and had to assemble words associated with age/control words into sentences, and found that walking speed down corridor was slower after priming with age-related words
• numerous reports of this kind, especially in social cognition have gained public currency, but there’s issues with replication and publication bias

Question 8

What is blindsight?

Answer 8

• naive model of voluntary reaction to a stimulus implies you have to consciously see a visual stimulus and intend to act to perform a voluntary action, behaviour can be unconsciously influenced by properties of stimuli that aren’t explicitly represented in conscious awareness
• patients with hemianopia (area of blindness in the visual field due to cortical damage) have no conscious awareness of stimuli in the blind region
• but if forced to guess they can voluntarily point at a moving object within the blind region and make some discriminations of them that are better than chance

Question 9

How are voluntary actions evoked by a stimuli of which normal Ss are unaware?
(Fehrer and Raab, 1962)

Answer 9

• had stimulus presented for 50ms and subject had to respond as fast as possible, in the other condition after the stimulus was presented a mask followed it so they aren’t aware of first stimuli
• both conditions had mean RT of 162ms
• stimulus that the subject doesn’t see can initiate intended action with reaction time unaffected

Question 10

What is Libet’s (1983) paradigm?

Answer 10

• participant raises finger when they feel like it and judges the moment W at which they consciously initiated the action
• readiness-potential onset precedes judged moment of intention to act
• same is true for briefer lateralised readiness potential (LRP) associated with selection of left vs right response

Question 11

What’s the definition of proximal and distal acts of choosing?

Answer 11

• that the unconscious carries out as they don’t require much focus
• done consciously as they require focus

Question 12

How does unconscious (intuitive) thinking differ from conscious thinking?

Answer 12

• there’s increasing acceptance that decision-making/reasoning may be done by 2 routes: intuition (automatic memory-based and conscious) as system 1 with step-by-step logical reasoning (conscious) as system 2
• sudden-insight unconscious problem-solving can be slow and both effective and creative, Dijksterhuis et al (2006) claimed unconscious decision making can be superior as it can slowly integrate many features