Consciousness and Cognition 22 (4):1318-1331 (2013)
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Abstract |
The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research.
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DOI | 10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.007 |
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References found in this work BETA
Consciousness, Accessibility, and the Mesh Between Psychology and Neuroscience.Ned Block - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5):481--548.
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Citations of this work BETA
Homing in on Consciousness in the Nervous System: An Action-Based Synthesis.Ezequiel Morsella, Christine A. Godwin, Tiffany K. Jantz, Stephen C. Krieger & Adam Gazzaley - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39:1-70.
External Control of the Stream of Consciousness: Stimulus-Based Effects on Involuntary Thought Sequences.Christina Merrick, Melika Farnia, Tiffany K. Jantz, Adam Gazzaley & Ezequiel Morsella - 2015 - Consciousness and Cognition 33:217-225.
Involuntary Entry Into Consciousness From the Activation of Sets: Object Counting and Color Naming.Sabrina Bhangal, Christina Merrick, Hyein Cho & Ezequiel Morsella - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
Externally Controlled Involuntary Cognitions and Their Relations with Other Representations in Consciousness.Donish Cushing, Adam Gazzaley & Ezequiel Morsella - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 55:1-10.
Internally Generated Conscious Contents: Interactions Between Sustained Mental Imagery and Involuntary Subvocalizations.Hyein Cho, Christine A. Godwin, Mark W. Geisler & Ezequiel Morsella - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
View all 9 citations / Add more citations
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