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Abstract:
A fundamental question concerns why we are conscious of, and able to communicate, some aspects of our mental life and not others. This question becomes all the more puzzling in light of computational frameworks that cast perception as an unconscious inference. I will survey the experimental literature on the measurement and quantification of conscious (vs. unconscious) mental states. I will also briefly outline different theoretical positions on consciousness, including global workspace and higher-order theories. l describe one theoretical model of the cognitive machinery supporting awareness– the higher-order state space (HOSS) model. HOSS suggests the subjective intensity of conscious experience is supported by a domain-general magnitude code that tracks the strength or intensity of first-order perceptual representations – a suggestion that dates back to Hume, but which has been largely overlooked in the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. I will present data from recent behavioural and neuroimaging experiments that find signatures of this content-invariant magnitude code in near-threshold perceptual tasks. These findings are consistent with awareness judgments being supported by an abstract, low-dimensional inference on the presence or absence of perceptual content. A neural code for mental strength is presumably central to communicating and sharing awareness of all types of content with others.
Short bio of the speaker:
Steve is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, and Group Leader at the Max Planck-UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. Steve received a first class BA in Psychology and Physiology at Oxford University (2003-2006) before completing a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL under the supervision of Ray Dolan and Chris Frith (2006-2011). He was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to study with Nathaniel Daw at New York University and Matthew Rushworth at Oxford (2011-2015), focusing on computational models of metacognition. Steve's research has been recognised with the William James Prize from the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2012), a "Rising Star" designation by the Association of Psychological Science (2015), the Wiley Prize in Psychology from the British Academy (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2017) and the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019).
Related article https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niz020/5803146#203416053
Maria Dimou / 66 Participants