A testable taxonomy for consciousness
For those of you who have not yet read it, the May 2006 issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences featured an important article by Stanislas Dehaene, and prominent colleagues, called “Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy”. The article is available here (PDF). Basically, the approach uses the neuronal workspace hypothesis to distinguish between […]
For those of you who have not yet read it, the May 2006 issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences featured an important article by Stanislas Dehaene, and prominent colleagues, called “Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing: a testable taxonomy”. The article is available here (PDF). Basically, the approach uses the neuronal workspace hypothesis to distinguish between different forms of mental processing.
This article is now the most read article in TICS.
Here is the abstract:
Of the many brain events evoked by a visual stimulus, which are specifically associated with conscious perception, and which merely reflect non-conscious processing? Several recent neuroimaging studies have contrasted conscious and non-conscious visual processing, but their results appear inconsistent. Some support a correlation of conscious perception with early occipital events, others with late parieto-frontal activity. Here we attempt to make sense of these dissenting results. On the basis of the global neuronal workspace hypothesis, we propose a taxonomy that distinguishes between vigilance and access to conscious report, as well as between subliminal, preconscious and conscious processing. We suggest that these distinctions map onto different neural mechanisms, and that conscious perception is systematically associated with surges of parieto-frontal activity causing top-down amplification.
See also the accompanying figure (click for larger version):
