A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness

by Bernard J. Baars

Index of Figures

Figure 1.12 The continuum of clear and fuzzy events
Figure 1.21 The Sperling Experiment: momentary conscious events may be difficult to recall
Figure 1.24 The Pani Experiment: Predictable mental images habituate with practice
Figure 1.37 Similarities between GW terms and other widespread ideas
Figure 1.41 The Sokolov argument: Habituated stimuli are still represented in the nervous system
Figure 1.44 The standard linguistic hierarchy
Figure 2.13 Trade-offs to maintain consistency in the Ames distorted room
Figure 2.14 Conscious experiences are always internally consistent
Figure 2.2 Model 1: A global workspace in a distributed system
Figure 2.42 Some time parameters of conscious experience and recall
Figure 2.62 The "Mind's Senses" as a global workspace equivalent
Figure 3.12 The ERTAS: a neural global workspace?
Figure 3.13 One possible scenario: Cortical centers competing for access to ERTAS
Figure 3.21 Model 1A: some changes suggested by the neurophysiology
Figure 4.11 Priming effects: Conscious events increase access to similar events
Figure 4.14 Presuppositions of the concept of "buying" that may become conscious upon violation
Figure 4.23 A significance hierarchy of goal contexts
Figure 4.3 Modeling contextual knowledge
Figure 4.35 Model 2. Contexts compete and cooperate to influence conscious experience
Figure 4.41 Surprising events erase conscious contents; the disruption may propagate through the context hierarchy
Figure 5.11 The Dalmatian in the Park: the need to establish a context for conscious experience
Figure 5.14 Conscious events help to create new contexts and to evoke old ones
Figure 5.2 Adaptation versus the search for information
Figure 5.3 Consciousness involves reduction of uncertainty in contexts and processors
Figure 5.31 Model 3: Feedback from adapting processors
Figure 5.53 An upward monotonic function between learning and information
Figure 6.13 The intention to speak: Many unconscious goal contexts cooperate to constrain a single sentence
Figure 6.21 Model 4. The triadic pattern pattern of spontaneous problem-solving
Figure 6.4 Goal contexts and the stream of consciousness
Figure 7.3 Model 5. A modern ideomotor theory of voluntary control
Figure 7.51 A slip of the tongue as a failure of competing systems to edit the error in time
Figure 7.61 Implicit decision-making as a vote between competing sets of processors
Figure 8.21 Model 6A: Automatic attention is controlled by goals
Figure 8.22 Metacognitive access: Recalling a conscious event from Short Term Memory
Figure 8.23 Model 6B: Voluntary control of attention; Options contexts serve as directories of readily available conscious topics
Figure 8.42 Repression as source amnesia for avoided conscious contents
Figure 9.2 Self as the enduring context of experience and action
Figure 9.22 The self-concept can evoke conscious self-monitoring
Figure 9.23 Model 7: Self-concept as a supervisory context within the self-system
Figure 9.34 Disruption due to competing contexts can propagate downward from the self system to local intentions

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