Task 9 Flashcards
Global states
States that concern an organism’s overall subjective profile and are associated with changes in arousal & behavioral responsiveness, also sometimes called the
‘level of consciousness’
Local states
States having ‘qualia’ that are characterized by what it is like to be in them. This can be a conscious perception, emotion or thought, e.g. smelling coffee, feeling joy, worrying about something. They are also sometimes referred to as the contents of consciousness
Attended intermediate representational theory
Consciousness occurs when intermediate-level perceptual representations gain access to attention.
Affect-based theories
Emphasize the brain’s role in physiological regulation as the basis for consciousness. Some of them deny that cortical mechanisms are necessary for
consciousness, instead locating the mechanisms of consciousness in the brainstem.
Higher-order theories (HOTs)
Mental states are conscious in virtue of being the target of specific kinds of meta-representation
Meta-representations
Representations that have as their targets other representations (and not merely representations that occur higher or deeper in a processing hierarchy).
Self-organizing meta-representational account
Consciousness involves higher-order brain networks learning to redescribe the representations encoded in lower-order networks in a way that counts as meta-representational.
Higher-order state space theory
Subjective reports of consciousness are actually decisions made by the brain about its own perceptions
Perceptual reality monitoring
Conscious perception arises when a higher-order network judges a first-order representation to be a reliable reflection of the external world.
Global workspace theories (GWTs)
They propose that conscious mental states are those that are globally available to a wide range of cognitive processes including attention, evaluation, memory and verbal report. In general, the wide accessibility of information to such consumer cognitive systems constitutes conscious experience.
Integrated information theory (IIT)
- Consciousness is identical to the cause-effect structure of a physical system that specifies a maximum of irreducible integrated information.
- The content of consciousness is associated with the form of the cause–effect structure, and the level of consciousness with its irreducibility, as measured by quantity Φ.
Φ
The amount of information specified by a system that is irreducible to that specified by its parts.
Re-entry theories
ToCs that state that conscious perception is associated with top-down (recurrent, re-entrant) signaling
Predictive processing theories
More general accounts of how brain & body function can be used to formulate explanations & predictions regarding properties of consciousness
Lamme’s local recurrency theory
A re-entry theory that states that localized recurrent (re-entrant) processing within
perceptual cortices is sufficient to give rise to consciousness, but parietal & frontal regions may be required for reporting the contents of perceptual experience or drawing on them for reasoning & decision-making.
