Off-campus access
Using PhilPapers from home?
Click here to configure this browser for off-campus access.
- Bernard J. Baars (2002). The Conscious Access Hypothesis: Origins and Recent Evidence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6 (1):47-52.
Discussion of Bernard J. Baars, The conscious access hypothesis: Origins and recent evidence
Nothing in this forum yet.
Similar books and articles
Defining consciousness along the lines of Nagel, an organism has consciousness iff there is something it is like to be that organism, I relate three types of consciousness (phenomenal, access and reflexive) to the three types of short-term memory (sensory memories, short-term working memory and the central executive). The suggestion is that these short-term memory stores may be a key feature of consciousness.
Cowan postulates that the capacity of short-term memory is limited to the number of items to which attention can be simultaneously directed. Unfortunately, he endows attention with unexplained properties, such as being able to locate the most recent inputs to short-term memory, so his theory does little more than restate the data.
No categories
High temporal resolution event-related brain potential and electroencephalographic coherence studies of the neural substrate of short-term storage in working memory indicate that the sustained coactivation of both prefrontal cortex and the posterior cortical systems that participate in the initial perception and comprehension of the retained information are involved in its storage. These studies further show that short-term storage mechanisms involve an increase in neural synchrony between prefrontal cortex and posterior cortex and the enhanced activation of long-term memory representations of material (...)


