Consciousness
PERTEMUAN 7
6.1 Issues in consciousness research
6.2 States of consciousness
6.3 Unconscious cognition
6.4 The function of consciousness
6.5 Cognitive theories of consciousness
6.1 Issues in consciousness
research
• The term ‘consciousness’ covers a wide
range of cognitive functions, including
voluntary action, decision making,
attention, awareness, and self-monitoring.
• It also covers sensory experiences, for
example what it feels like to taste
chocolate as opposed to cabbage or to
look at something red rather than blue.
• psychologists and neuroscientists study
consciousness by investigating the
cognitive and neural processes underlying
conscious perceptions, decisions,
recollections, actions
The easy problem of
consciousness.
Chalmers(1996)
This research addresses the problem of how we
can filter and interpret an enormous amount of
incoming sensory information and use it to make
decisions, modify our behavior, reflect on past
events, plan for the future, hold conversations,
recognize friends etc.
• This aspect of consciousness is also known as
access consciousness (Block, 1995).
The hard problem
Block(1995)
• Conscious experience is sometimes
referred to as phenomenal
consciousness
• is the problem of explaining how and why
these neural and cognitive processes
cause conscious experience
6.2 States of consciousness
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Sleep and dreaming
Drug effects
Hypnosis
Phantom Limbs
Sleep and dreaming
• Experiments regarding the patterns of EEG
changes during sleep and waking have shown
that specific kinds of wave activity can be
associated with certain kinds of unconscious
(i.e., sleeping) states.
• There are different patterns for deep sleep vs.
REM sleep, so different degrees/types of
unconsciousness are apparent.
6.3 Unconscious cognition
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Perception without awareness
Unconscious processes in language
Implicit learning and memory
Action without awareness
Perception without awareness
Blindsight
• When large portions of V1, primary visual cortex, are
destroyed, patients report complete blindness; i.e. they
are not visually conscious.
• However, on forced choice tasks (where they must
answer yes or no, left or right, etc.) they perform far
better than chance for locating objects.
– When objects are moving, they do quite well.
– If the objects move fast enough, they occasionally report vague
visual experiences.
– Some argue that another visual pathway is sending small
amounts of visual information to the visual cortex, and that this
can eventually elicit partial conscious experiences.
Action without awareness
Unconscious action:
• Milner and Goodale have shown
convincingly that much actions is guided
without subjective experience.
• Patients with ventral damage can catch a
ball, but don't have a normal experience of
a round object coming at them (and can
interact with but not report the angle of a
slot).
6.4 The function of consciousness
• Conscious processes are slow compared
with unconscious processes, but they
enable us to behave adaptively, to change
habitual responses and behave
appropriately in new situations.
6.5 Cognitive theories of
consciousness
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Working memory
Norman and Shallice’s model
Global workspace theory
Multiple drafts