Consciousness

Definition:
- Consciousness is the sense of being alert and aware of thoughts and surroundings.
- It encompasses the subjective quality of experience.
Key Distinctions:
- Conscious Content: Relates to the information we are aware of.
- Conscious Level: Refers to the degree of awareness, which can change.
Key Characteristics:
- Consciousness covers various aspects: information, perception, feelings, thoughts, and self-awareness.
- It is not monodimensional; it presents both behavioral and neural evidence.

Access Consciousness:
- Information that is available for cognitive processes and can be communicated to others.
Phenomenal Consciousness:
- Raw experience that is difficult to assess or articulate.
- Considered much richer than access consciousness.
- Differentiates between basic forms of experience and higher-level understanding (Baumeister).

Integral Functions:
- Consciousness is transversal to many cognitive processes. For example:
- Categorization and Detection of Stimuli
- Information Integration
- Access to Internal States and Memories
- Behavior Control
Problem of Consciousness:
- Differentiates between primary and self-consciousness.
- Qualia: Refers to individual instances of subjective experience, highlighting the difference between personal perception and objective reality.
- Easy vs. Hard Problem:
- Easy problem: explain functions, dynamics, and contents of consciousness.
- Hard problem: explain why certain neural mechanisms correlate with consciousness.
- Consciousness may constitute more than a sum of experiences, also playing a role in forming a sense of self and engaging in self-processing.

Perception and Social Communication:
- Involves body self-consciousness and interaction. The controversy includes debates about the reality of conscious influence— does it entail subliminal information and impact attention or perception.
- Controversial Viewpoints:
- Some assert consciousness cannot impact cognitive processes, leading to questions about overinterpretation of conscious experience.
Thoughts and Actions:
- The relationship between consciousness and free will is debated. Concepts include:
- Principle of Priority, Consistency, Exclusivity: How prior influences manifest in behavioral choices.
- Sense of Agency: Awareness regarding control over actions or decisions.
- Libet Study (1983):
- Highlights the complex interaction between conscious and unconscious processes in decision making through experimental manipulations.

Methods of Assessment:
- Behavioral Methods: Verbal reports, yes/no decisions. Challenges exist since conscious experience is richer than mere reports.
- Different methods yield varying results highlighting issues like under-reporting of conscious experience.
- Change Blindness: People often overestimate their ability to detect change in their surroundings.
- Top-down Processes: Influence how gaps in perception are filled cognitively.

Stages of Degraded Consciousness:
- Understanding of consciousness affected by damage can occur in three stages
1. Coma
2. Vegetative State
3. Minimally Conscious State
Connection from Brainstem to Cortical Areas:
- Both behavioral and neuroimaging measures aid in assessing consciousness post-damage.

Global Workspace Theory:
- Proposed by Baars (1988) and expanded by Dehaene & Changeux (2011).
- Theatre Metaphor: Various unconscious processes work in the background but synchronize with central events to make information available to the global workspace.
- Involvement of the cortex and thalamus in conscious experience is emphasized.
Integrated Information Theory (Tononi, 2016):
- Argues that conscious experience correlates with the integrated activation within large brain networks.
- Key properties include:
- Accessible only to oneself
- Specificity
- Complexity
- Unity

Challenges in identifying overlap between brain regions associated with conscious experience and other cognitive processes.
Psychophysics: Study of physical stimuli and interactions with sensory systems.
Research Examples: Kim & Blake (2005) and Breitmeyer (2015) provide evidence of different methodologies assessing levels of unconscious processing.

Blindsight: Ability to respond to stimuli without conscious awareness of it.
Subliminal Perception: Stimulus presented under the perceptive threshold, can influence behavior or sleep patterns.
Backward Masking: Disrupts the processing of stimuli through interruption of visual processing streams.
Bistable Perception: Ability to alternate between two different percepts.
Binocular Rivalry: Competition between two eyes presenting different images.

Attention and consciousness have overlapping sets but can be experimentally disentangled.
Attentional Paradigms:
- Variations of focus greatly influence perceptual and cognitive responses.
- Key distinctions made between attended and unattended stimuli in experiments (Reference: Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007).

Change Blindness and Inattentional Blindness: Highlight issues and limitations in visual awareness and attentional capacity.
Natural Scene Perception: Gist perception with rapid scene rendering to evaluate attentional capacities using RSVP paradigms.

The state where information is available for processing but remains outside conscious awareness.
Priming: Activation of memory traces that influence future behavior or thought.
Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon: Experience of inability to retrieve a memory despite feeling of knowing.
Automatic Actions: Actions performed without conscious awareness due to storage mechanisms of memories.

Although difficult to define, consciousness underpins numerous cognitive functions.
Functions include:
- Social communication
- Sense of agency
- Action control
- Planning and thoughts
Consciousness is complex, can be altered, and its assessment relies heavily on language capabilities.
Current theories emphasize the global workspace and integrated information theories but highlight the intricacy of consciousness regarding overlap with attention and perception.