The interplay of attention and consciousness in visual search, attentional blink and working memory consolidation

Abstract

Despite the acknowledged relationship between consciousness and attention, theories of the two have mostly been developed separately. Moreover, these theories have independently attempted to explain phenomena in which both are likely to interact, such as the attentional blink (AB) and working memory (WM) consolidation. Here, we make an effort to bridge the gap between, on the one hand, a theory of consciousness based on the notion of global workspace (GW) and, on the other, a synthesis of theories of visual attention. We offer a theory of attention and consciousness (TAC) that provides a unified neurocognitive account of several phenomena associated with visual search, AB and WM consolidation. TAC assumes multiple processing stages between early visual representation and conscious access, and extends the dynamics of the global neuronal workspace model to a visual attentional workspace (VAW). The VAWis controlled by executive routers, higher-order representations of executive operations in the GW, without the need for explicit saliency or priority maps. TAC leads to newly proposed mechanisms for illusory conjunctions, AB, inattentional blindness and WM capacity, and suggests neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness. Finally, the theory reconciles the all-or-none and graded perspectives on conscious representation

On the interplay between working memory consolidation and attentional selection in controlling conscious access: parallel processing at a cost—a comment on ‘The interplay of attention and consciousness in visual search, attentional blink and working memory consolidation’

“…Raffone et al [1] respond to this evidence by attempting to reconcile the GW theory with such evidence. The theory of attentional control (TAC) boldly pushes the unitary nature of cognition even further by proposing that STM encoding and attentional selection also time-share central processing capacity, so that only one of them can occur at a time.…”

Perceptual awareness and its neural basis: bridging experimental and theoretical paradigms

“…Iconic memory has explicitly been associated with (phenomenal) consciousness in relatively recent theoretical developments [18][19][20][21]. Finally, masking has recently been used to gain insights into the speed of consolidation in visual working memory [22,23], a phenomenon related to both attentional and conscious processing [24,25].…”

Rapid switching and complementary evidence accumulation enable flexibility of an all-or-none global workspace for control of attentional and conscious processing: a reply to Wyble et al .

“…First of all, we note that the TAC as described in Raffone et al [6], in spite of the claims in Wyble et al's [7] comment, is in principle neutral with respect to serial versus parallel consolidation in WM. These issues are not explicitly addressed in the current, first formulation of the theory, which is to be developed further in order to account for a broader set of data, including divided attention and multitasking paradigms (e.g.…”

“…Although TAC proposes a winner-take-all or all-or-none competition between higher-order executive routers for consolidation in WM and attentional selection in the GW, it also includes complementary graded and ongoing evidence accumulation processes driving such competition, and assumes the possibility of rapid and reversible switches between the ignition (activation) of either the attentional selection or the WM consolidation router. In TAC, such reversibility is central to account for trials in which the AB does not occur even with lags such as lag-2 and lag-3, in terms of a sparing recovery process [6]. Because of these mechanisms, the model is able to account for the first empirical benchmark.…”

“…[3][4][5]), a unifying theory has been lacking. As an attempt to bridge these domains, we recently proposed the Theory of Attention and Consciousness (TAC; [6]). TAC provides a unified neurocognitive account of several phenomena associated with visual search, attentional blink (AB), and working memory (WM) consolidation.…”