Bernard J Baars

Keywords: consciousness, spontaneous thought, experience monitoring, resting state, default state
DOI: 10.1037/a0018726

What scientists expect their subjects to do may not be what those subjects end up doing. This point may be critical when researchers study spontaneous thoughts by assigning people a competing task, especially one that may be personally unimportant. The spontaneous stream of thought has been studied using thought reports concurrent with signal-detection tasks, asking subjects for both “task-related” and “task-unrelated” thoughts (Antrobus, 1999; Singer, 1993). Yet a tricky question emerges: When is the experimenter entitled to define task-relevance? After all, being in an experiment is only a fleeting episode in the subject’s life. When we use the term mind wandering for task-unrelated thoughts, we may be falling into the trap of believing that spontaneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. A similar stigma is attached to terms like cognitive failures, resting state, rumination, distraction, attentional failures, absent-mindedness, repetitiveness, mind lapses, going AWOL in the brain, cortical idling, and the like (Smallwood, O’Connor, & Sudberry, 2007; Smallwood & Schooler, 2006). Indeed, the spontaneous activity of the brain during rest breaks from an experimental task was initially called a “default” or “resting state,” when it is in fact an extremely active state and one that is plausibly in pursuance of fundamental life tasks (Dehaene & Changeux, 2005; Delamillieure et al., 2009).
Are we being misled by such tendentious labels? I believe we often are. William James remarked, when he was accused of being absent-minded, that he was really just present-minded to his own thoughts (Barzun, 1983). Smallwood and Schooler (2006) made a similar point by suggesting that “mind-wandering can be seen as a goal driven process” (p. 946). Nevertheless, Christoff, Gordon, Smallwood, Smith, and Schooler (2009) wrote that “neural recruitment in both default and executive network regions was strongest when subjects were unaware of their own mind wandering, suggesting that mind wandering is most pronounced when it lacks meta-awareness” (p. 8719). The problem is that human beings are likely to be the most deeply absorbed and hence the least self-aware during the most important experiences of their lives. The absence of self-consciousness at such times may not be mind-wandering but rather, as James called it, present-mindedness to what is most important.
The stream of spontaneous thought is remarkably rich and self-relevant, reflecting one’s greatest personal concerns, interpersonal feelings, unfulfilled goals and unresolved challenges, worries and hopes, inner debates, self-monitoring, feelings of knowing, visual imagery, imaginary social interactions, recurrent beliefs, coping reactions, intrusive memories, daydreams and fantasies, future plans, and more—all of which are known to guide the stream of thought. Spontaneous ideation goes on during all of one’s waking hours, according to randomly timed thought-monitoring studies (Klinger, 1999; Singer & Salovey, 1999). However, it continues even during sleep. All humans have 90–120 min per night of REM dreams, which involve vivid, emotional, and dramatic experiences, judging by both brain activity and immediate reports (Payne, Stickgold, Swanberg, & Kensinger, 2008). Surprisingly, even slow-wave sleep shows reportable inner speech,
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APA

Seth AK, Baars BJ, Edelman DB. Criteria for consciousness in humans and other mammals. Conscious Cogn 2005;14:119–39. Slater R, Cantarella A, Gallella S, Worley A, Boyd S, Meek J, et al. Cortical pain responses in human infants. J Neurosci 2006;26:3662–6. Taddio A, Shah V, Gilbert-MacLeod C, Katz J. Conditioning and hyperalgesia in newborns exposed to repeated heel lances. J Am Med Assoc 2002;288:857–61.

Can we make progress exploring consciousness? Or is it forever beyond human reach? In science we never know the ultimate outcome of the journey. We can only take whatever steps our current knowledge affords. This paper explores today's evidence from the viewpoint of Global Workspace (GW) theory. 1 First, we ask what kind of evidence has the most direct bearing on the question. The answer given here is 'contrastive analysis' — a set of paired comparisons between similar conscious and unconscious processes. This body of evidence is already quite large, and constrains any possible theory (Baars, 1983; 1988; 1997). Because it involves both conscious and unconscious events, it deals directly with our own subjective experience, as anyone can tell by trying the demonstrations in this article. One dramatic contrast is between the vast number of unconscious neural processes happen- ing in any given moment, compared to the very narrow bottleneck of conscious capacity. The narrow l...

ABSTRACT Doerig et al. point out that there is now a great deal of evidence bearing directly on our understanding of consciousness. However, they argue that the multiplicity of theories suggest that we have a ‘lack of stringent criteria specifying how empirical data constrains ToCs.’

Neurofeedback (NFB) is emerging as a promising technique that enables self-regulation of ongoing brain oscillations. However, despite a rise in empirical evidence attesting to its clinical benefits, a solid theoretical basis is still lacking on the manner in which NFB is able to achieve these outcomes. The present work attempts to bring together various concepts from neurobiology, engineering, and dynamical systems so as to propose a contemporary theoretical framework for the mechanistic effects of NFB. The objective is to provide a firmly neurophysiological account of NFB, which goes beyond traditional behaviorist interpretations that attempt to explain psychological processes solely from a descriptive standpoint whilst treating the brain as a "black box". To this end, we interlink evidence from experimental findings that encompass a broad range of intrinsic brain phenomena: starting from "bottom-up" mechanisms of neural synchronization, followed by "top-do...

Significant debate on fundamental issues remains in the subfields of cognitive science, including perception, memory, attention, action selection, learning, and others. Psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence each contribute alternative and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the supervening problem of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Current efforts toward a broad-based, systems-level model of minds cannot await theoretical convergence in each of the relevant subfields. Such work therefore requires the formulation of tentative hypotheses, based on current knowledge, that serve to connect cognitive functions into a theoretical framework for the study of the mind. We term such hypotheses “conceptual commitments” and describe the hypotheses underlying one such model, the Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent (LIDA) Model. Our intention is to initiate a discussion among AGI researchers about which conceptual commitments are essential, or particularly useful, tow...

A recent theory of lexical access in picture naming maintains that all nonword errors are generated during the retrieval of phonemic segments from the lexicon (Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997b). This theory is challenged by "dual origin" theories that postulate a second, post-lexical mechanism, whose disruption gives rise to "phonemic paraphasias" bearing close resemblance to the target. We tested the dual origin theory in a corpus of 457 nonword errors drawn from 18 subjects with fluent aphasia. The corpus was divided into two parts, based on degree of phonological overlap between error and target, and these parts were separately examined for proposed diagnostic characteristics of the postlexical error mechanism: serial order effects across the word, sensitivity to target length, and insensitivity to target frequency. Results did not support the dual origin theory but were consistent with a single, lexical origin account in which segment retrieval operates from left to right, rather than in parallel. Findings from this study also shed new light on how individual differences in the severity of the retrieval deficit modulate the expression of phonological errors in relation to target characteristics.

In an attempt to illustrate the application of cognitive science principles to hard AI problems in machine learning we propose the LIDA technology, a cognitive science based architecture capable of more human-like learning. A LIDA based software agent or cognitive robot will be capable of three fundamental, continuously active, humanlike learning mechanisms: 1) perceptual learning, the learning of new objects, categories, relations, etc., 2) episodic learning of events, the what, where, and when, 3) procedural learning, the ...

In this paper we present the LIDA architecture as a working model of cognition. We argue that such working models are broad in scope and address real world problems in comparison to experimentally based models which focus on specific pieces of cognition. While experimentally based models are useful, we need a working model of cognition that integrates what we know from neuroscience, cognitive science and AI. The LIDA architecture provides such a working model. A LIDA based cognitive robot or software agent will be ...

The standard behavioral index for human consciousness is the ability to report events with accuracy. While this method is routinely used for scientific and medical applications in humans, it is not easy to generalize to other species. Brain evidence may lend itself more easily to comparative testing. Human consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. These features have also been found in other mammals, which suggests that consciousness is a major biological adaptation in mammals. We suggest more than a dozen additional properties of human consciousness that may be used to test comparative predictions. Such homologies are necessarily more remote in non-mammals, which do not share the thalamocortical complex. However, as we learn more we may be able to make "deeper" predictions that apply to some birds, reptiles, large-brained invertebrates, and perhaps other species.

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Page 1. Contents Preface / vii Can NLP Systems be a Cognitive Black Box? (Is Cognitive Science Relevant to AI Problems?) / 1 Jerry T. Ball CogSci to AI: It's the Brainware, Stupid! / 7 Jacob Beal and Gerald Jay Sussman New Challenges for AI in Military Simulation: Are Multilevel Heterogeneous Models the Solution? / 9 Paul Bello Cognitive Approaches to the Traveling Salesperson Problem: Perceptual Complexity that Produces Computational Simplicity / 11 Bradley J. Best Robust Inference with Simple Cognitive Models / 17 Henry Brighton ...

Several distinguished theoretical physicists have proposed thai conscious experience and Quantum Mechanics are closely connected. Alas for a beautiful hypothesis, thc ugly facts do noi seem 10 provide any support, at least not yet-But there is a large array of well-established empirical findings bearing directly on consciousness, to which QM has not been applied. I lay out a sizable set of facts that any theory of consciousness must explain, and sketch out areas where modem physics may be able to help us gain a ...

The metacognitive stance of Smith et al.(2003) risks ignoring sensory consciousness. Although Smith et al. rightly caution against the tendency to preserve the uniqueness of the human mind at all costs, their reasoned stance is undermined by a selective association of consciousness with high-level cognitive operations. Neurobiological evidence may offer a more general, and hence more inclusive, basis for the systematic study of animal consciousness.

Abstract: Conscious events interact with memory systems in learning, rehearsal and retrieval (Ebbinghaus 1885/1964; Tulving 1985). Here we present hypotheses that arise from the IDA computional model (Franklin, Kelemen and McCauley 1998; Franklin 2001b) of global workspace theory (Baars 1988, 2002). Our primary tool for this exploration is a flexible cognitive cycle employed by the IDA computational model and hypothesized to be a basic element of human cognitive processing. Since cognitive cycles are hypothesized to occur ...

The standard behavioral index for human consciousness is the ability to report events with accuracy. While this method is routinely used for scientific and medical applications in humans, it is not easy to generalize to other species. Brain evidence may lend itself more easily to comparative testing. Human consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. These features have also been found in other mammals, which suggests that consciousness is a major biological adaptation in mammals. We suggest more than a dozen additional properties of human consciousness that may be used to test comparative predictions. Such homologies are necessarily more remote in non-mammals, which do not share the thalamocortical complex. However, as we learn more we may be able to make "deeper" predictions that apply to some birds, reptiles, large-brained invertebrates, and perhaps other species.

1. Conscious Cogn. 1996 Sep;5(3):261-4. When are images conscious? The curious disconnection between imagery and consciousness in the scientific literature. Baars BJ. PMID: 8906403 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]. Publication Types: Editorial. MeSH Terms. Consciousness*; Emotions; Humans; Imagination*; Mental Recall; Sensation; Verbal Behavior.

Abstract 1. Expresses reservations concerning not the content but the vocabulary used by RB Zajonc in his article on feeling and thinking (see record 1980-09733-001). The vocabulary serves to perpetuate a pervasive confusion among several legitimate senses of the words cognitive and inference.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Recent scientific findings indicate that consciousness is a fundamental biological adaptation. The known brain correlates of consciousness appear to be ancient phylogenetically, going back at least to early mammals. In all mammals alertness and sensory consciousness are required for the goal-directed behaviors that make species survival and reproduction possible. In all mammals the anatomy, physiology, neurochemistry and electrical activity of the brain in alert states shows striking similarities. After more than ...

The mycotoxin, deoxynivalenol (DON), is produced world-wide by the Fusarium genus in different cereal crops. We derived a provisional TDI of 1.1 microg/kg body weight (bw) and proposed a concentration limit of 129 microg DON/kg wheat based on this TDI and a high wheat consumption of children. In the period September 1998-January 2000, the average DON concentration in wheat was 446 microg/kg (n = 219) in The Netherlands. During this period, the dietary intake of DON exceeded the provisional TDI, especially in children. Eighty percent of the one-year-olds showed a DON intake above the provisional TDI and 20% of these children exceeded twice the provisional TDI. Our probabilistic effect assessment shows that at these exposure levels, health effects may occur. Suppressive effects on body weights and relative liver weight were estimated at 2.2 and 2.7%. However, the large confidence intervals around these estimates indicated that the magnitudes of these effects are uncertain.