Brain representation of perceptual stimuli at different levels of awareness
Birgitta Dresp-Langley

TL;DR
This paper challenges the assumption that some brain representations are permanently unconscious, proposing that neural architectures inspired by primate cortex can generate metarepresentations of nonconscious knowledge, enabling awareness through adaptive resonance.
Contribution
It introduces neural network models that explain how unconscious knowledge can become conscious via context-sensitive adaptive learning and resonance mechanisms.
Findings
Subliminal targets can become conscious in appropriate contexts
Neural architectures can generate metarepresentations of nonconscious knowledge
Adaptive resonance facilitates awareness of nonconscious signals
Abstract
This article questions the widespread assumption that there are brain representations that will always remain unconscious in the sense of being inaccessible to individual awareness under any circumstances. This implies that some part of the knowledge generated by the brain is once and for always excluded from consciousness and, therefore, from being communicated to the outside world. This standpoint neglects the possibility that the human brain might have a capacity for generating metarepresentations of nonconscious knowledge contents at a given moment in time through context sensitive adaptive learning, and is somewhat difficult to reconcile with experimental findings showing that initially subliminal targets can be made available to awareness, or break through to supraliminal levels of processing, when they are embedded in an appropriate perceptual object context (relevance…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCognitive Science and Education Research · Neural Networks and Applications
