How conscious experience and working memory interact

Baars, Bernard J.; Franklin, Stan

doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00056-1

Cited by 380 publications

(253 citation statements)

References 20 publications

(21 reference statements)

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“…All aspects of consciousness develop systematically from birth to maturity Kazi 2001, 2006;Demetriou and Bakracevic 2009;Zelazo 2004), improving the quality of subjective experience, the resolution and refinement of mental processing, and executive control (Baars and Franklin 2003). In the first year of life, there is body-action consciousness that involves implicit awareness of one's own actions and bodily sensations (Kopp 2011).…”

Section: The Development Of Consciousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm

Δημητρίου

Spanoudis

Mouyi³

2011

Educ Psychol Rev

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This essay first summarizes an overarching theory of cognitive organization and development. This theory claims that the human mind involves (1) several specialized structural systems dealing with different domains of relations in the environment, (2) a central representational capacity system, (3) general inferential processes, and (4) consciousness. These systems interact dynamically during development so that changes in each are related to changes in others. The changes in all systems and the change mechanisms are described. This theory integrates research and theorizing from cognitive, developmental, and differential psychology. Based on this theory, a model for education is proposed that specifies, first, educational priorities for different phases of development according to the cognitive developmental milestones associated with each phase. The theory also specifies how education can educate students to (1) construct mental models for the sake of conceptual change, (2) use their central representational capacity efficiently, (3) advance analogical and deductive reasoning, (4) learn how to learn, and (5) become critical and creative thinkers. The theory is offered as an overarching paradigm for the architecture, the development, and the education of the human mind.

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Section: The Development Of Consciousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm

Δημητρίου

Spanoudis

Mouyi³

2011

Educ Psychol Rev

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“…Creative thought in science as well as in other domains such as the visual arts, mathematics, music, and dance requires the capacity to manipulate mental representations flexibly. Cognitive scientists refer to this capacity as a "mental workspace" and suggest that it is a key function of consciousness (2) involving the distribution of information among widespread, specialized subdomains (3).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Network structure and dynamics of the mental workspace

Schlegel

Kohler

Fogelson

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Significance We do not know how the human brain mediates complex and creative behaviors such as artistic, scientific, and mathematical thought. Scholars theorize that these abilities require conscious experience as realized in a widespread neural network, or “mental workspace,” that represents and manipulates images, symbols, and other mental constructs across a variety of domains. Evidence for such a complex, interconnected network has been difficult to produce with current techniques that mainly study brain activity in isolation and are insensitive to distributed informational processes. The present work takes advantage of emerging techniques in network and information analysis to provide empirical support for such a widespread and interconnected information processing network in the brain that supports the manipulation of visual imagery.

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“…Thus, our results suggest that spatial information can be retained under the condition of blindsight. The ability to retain information for several seconds to guide goal-directed behaviors is often called "working memory" (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974), and its relationship with visual awareness has been discussed on many occasions (Baars, 1988;Crick and Koch, 1995;Dehaene and Naccache, 2001;Engel and Singer, 2001;Baars and Franklin, 2003), some of which proposed that working memory and visual awareness would be tightly linked to each other (Baars, 2003;Koch, 2004). Although here we examined only spatial memory for saccades, our results can be a counter-evidence to this proposal and might challenge the view on the relationship between visual awareness and working memory.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Substrate of Spatial Memory in the Superior Colliculus after Damage to the Primary Visual Cortex

Takaura¹,

Yoshida²,

Isa³

2011

J. Neurosci.

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In the primate brain, the primary visual cortex (V1) is a major source of visual information processing in the cerebral cortex, although some patients and monkeys with damage to the V1 show visually guided behaviors in the visual field affected by the damage. Until now, behaviors of the surviving brain regions after damage to V1 and their contribution to the residual visual functions remain unclear. Here, we report that the monkeys with a unilateral lesion of V1 can make not only visually guided saccades but also memory-guided saccades (MGS) into the affected visual field. Furthermore, while the monkeys were performing the MGS task, sustained activity was observed in a large fraction of the neurons in the superior colliculus ipsilateral to the lesion, which has been supposed as a key node for recovery after damage to V1. These neurons maintained the spatial information throughout the delay period regardless of whether they exhibited saccadic bursts or not, which was not the case on the intact side. Error analysis revealed that the sustained activity was correlated with monkeys' behavioral outcome. These results suggest that the ipsilesional SC might function as a neural substrate for spatial memory in the affected visual field. Our findings provide new insight into the understanding of the compensatory mechanisms after damage to V1.

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How conscious experience and working memory interact

Cited by 380 publications

References 20 publications

Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm

Educating the Developing Mind: Towards an Overarching Paradigm

Network structure and dynamics of the mental workspace

Neural Substrate of Spatial Memory in the Superior Colliculus after Damage to the Primary Visual Cortex

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