Does consciousness overflow cognitive access? Novel insights from the new phenomenon of attribute amnesia

Fu, Yingtao; Yan, Wenchen; Shen, Mowei; Chen, Hui

doi:10.1007/s11427-020-1831-8

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 129 publications

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“…Other theories, in contrast, posit that P-consciousness is distinct and independent from the collection of cognitive processes related to access (Tononi, 2004;Tsuchiya et al, 2015). The debate on whether phenomenology overflows access is ongoing (Fu et al, 2021). Notwithstanding the empirical challenge in arbitrating between these different conceptions, it is important to refocus the debate to the main aim of the science of consciousness, i.e., what theories of consciousness ultimately aim to explain is the phenomenological qualities of experiences, the "what it is like to be in that state" (Revonsuo, 2006).…”

Section: Addressing the Central Problem Of Consciousness: Phenomenologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not easily, as (some) theories of consciousness have not made explicit what they assume to be experienced (this is a separate question from whether Pconsciousness is fully subsumed under in A-consciousness). Some could claim that subjects experience the letter but not its color (Fu et al, 2021). Thus, in the absence of explicit assumptions from the theories about the phenomenological qualities of consciousness, the debate between access and phenomenal consciousness will not easily be settled empirically.…”

Section: Addressing the Central Problem Of Consciousness: Phenomenologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The search for the neural correlate of consciousness: Progress and challenges

Lepauvre

Melloni

2021

PhiMiSci

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Twenty years ago, Thomas Metzinger published the book "The Neural Correlates of Consciousness" amassing the state of knowledge in the field of consciousness studies at the time from philosophical and empirical perspectives. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of this impactful publication, we review the progress the field has made since then and the important methodological challenges it faces. A tremendous number of empirical studies have been conducted, which has led to the identification of many candidate neural correlates of consciousness. Yet, this tremendous amount of work has not unraveled a consensual account of consciousness as of now. Many questions, some already raised twenty years ago, remain unanswered, and an enormous proliferation of theories sharply contrasts with the scarcity of compelling data and methodological challenges. The contrastive method, the foundational method used to study the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), has also been called into question. And while awareness in the community of its shortcomings is widespread, few concrete attempts have been made to go beyond it and/or to revise existing theories. We propose several methodological shifts that we believe may help to advance the quest of the NCC program, while remaining uncommitted to any specific theory: (1) the currently prevalent “contrastive method” should lose its monopoly in favor of methods that attempt to explain the phenomenology of experience; (2) experimental data should be shared in centralized, multi-methods databases, transcending the limitations of individual experiments by granting granularity and power to generalize findings and “distill” the NCC proper; (3) the explanatory power of theories should be directly pitted against each other to overcome the non-productive fractioning of the field into insular camps seeking confirmatory evidence for their theories. We predict these innovations might enable the field to progress towards the goal of explaining consciousness.

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Section: Addressing the Central Problem Of Consciousness: Phenomenologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Addressing the Central Problem Of Consciousness: Phenomenologymentioning

confidence: 99%

The search for the neural correlate of consciousness: Progress and challenges

Lepauvre

Melloni

2021

PhiMiSci

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“…Traditionally, attention has been proposed as the gateway to working memory, as it determines what information is selected into working memory [14][15][16] . However, recent attribute amnesia studies challenged this assumption by showing that even fully attended information could not be selected into working memory [17][18][19][20][21] . For example, participants were asked to find a target letter among distractor digits and report its location.…”

Section: It Has Been Believed That Attention Not Only Determines What...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of memory selection: When children have better memory than adults

Fu¹,

Guo²,

He³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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The development of cognitive selectivity focuses primarily on the ability of attentional selection. The current study explored the development of another critical but overlooked selective function—memory selection, by comparing the ability of filtering attended yet outdated information between young children and adults. By adopting a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking technology, Experiments 1-3 consistently showed a “developmental reversal”-like phenomenon that children outperformed adults in reporting the attended yet outdated information. Moreover, this was not caused by the different processing strategy (Experiment 2) or different deployment of attention (Experiment 3) between adults and children. These results suggest that the ability of memory selection is not fully developed for young children, leading to their inefficient filtering of attended yet outdated information that is not required for memory. This demonstration significantly deepens our understanding of the development of cognitive selectivity, and also has implications for understanding the development of cognitive inhibition and early learning.

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“…This occurs even if the person attends to the attribute that is subsequently unexpectedly tested (H. Chen & Wyble, 2016). It seems that AA occurs partly because our conscious experience is richer than what can be reported (Fu et al., 2021) but also because the degree to which an aspect of an attended stimulus is encoded in visual short-term memory is influenced by whether not the participant expects to report it (Harrison et al., 2021; Wyble et al., 2019). While AA is typically tested using simple images, it will also occur for complex images if the images are repeated (H. Chen & Howe, 2017; H. Chen et al., 2019) and sometimes even if they are not repeated (Tam et al., 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Attribute Amnesia in the Auditory Domain

Howe

Lee

2021

Perception

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Individuals are often unable to report an attribute of an object to which they recently attended, if they expected to report a different attribute, a phenomenon known as attribute amnesia (AA). To date, all AA studies have occurred in the visual domain. The purpose of this study was to explore the boundary conditions of AA by testing if AA also occurs in the auditory domain and, if so, for which attributes. It was found that AA was present when reporting the location ( p = .003) and the number of tones ( p < .001) of an auditory stimulus, but not when reporting its pitch ( p = .383). These findings can be understood in terms of the organisation of the primary cortical areas and help explain the differences between visual working memory and auditory working memory.

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Does consciousness overflow cognitive access? Novel insights from the new phenomenon of attribute amnesia

Cited by 12 publications

References 129 publications

The search for the neural correlate of consciousness: Progress and challenges

The search for the neural correlate of consciousness: Progress and challenges

The development of memory selection: When children have better memory than adults

Attribute Amnesia in the Auditory Domain

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