Papers by Bernard J Baars
Psychological Bulletin, 2010
Keywords: consciousness, spontaneous thought, experience monitoring, resting state, default stat... more 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,
1
APA
Commentaries
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1997
Endothelin antagonists in CION injury model
Pain, 2006
Seth AK, Baars BJ, Edelman DB. Criteria for consciousness in humans and other mammals. Conscious ... more 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.
at Springfield * As always, I want to close by thanking my Dean, as well as my Department Chair, ... more at Springfield * As always, I want to close by thanking my Dean, as well as my Department Chair, at the University of Illinois at Springfield for making it possible for me to devote more attention to this Newsletter than I would have been able to do otherwise. Let me end with a special note. Now when the APA site is relatively in order 2 I would want to guide the Readers towards this Newsletter's history. The older issues, I think especially those edited by Jon Dorbolo, 3 will remain an excellent source of information about the history of philosophy and computing and are still very much worth browsing through. Endnotes 1. I want to thank T. Beavers for his impromptu invitation during my visit there.
Can we make progress exploring consciousness? Or is it forever beyond human reach? In science we ... more 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...
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
The Hard Problem is Mainly Hard Work
Cognitive Neuroscience, 2020
ABSTRACT Doerig et al. point out that there is now a great deal of evidence bearing directly on o... more 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.’
What is it Good For? The Functions of Consciousness
In the Theater of Consciousness, 1997
Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2014
Neurofeedback (NFB) is emerging as a promising technique that enables self-regulation of ongoing ... more 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...
We argue that the functions of consciousness are implemented in a bio-computational manner. That ... more We argue that the functions of consciousness are implemented in a bio-computational manner. That is to say, the conscious as well as the non-conscious aspects of human thinking, planning, and perception are produced by adaptive, biological algorithms. We propose that machine consciousness may be produced by similar adaptive algorithms running on the machine Global Workspace Theory is currently the most empirically supported and widely discussed theory of consciousness. It provides a high-level description of such algorithms, based on a large body of psychological and brain evidence. LIDA provides an explicit implementation of much of GWT, which can be shown to perform human-like tasks, such as the interactive assignment of naval jobs to sailors. Here we provide brief descriptions of both GWT and LIDA in relation to the scientific evidence bearing on consciousness in the brain. A companion article explores how this approach could lead to machine consciousness (Franklin et al 2009 to appear). We also discuss the important distinction between volition and consciously mediated action selection, and describe an operational definition of consciousness via verifiable reportability. These are issues that may well bear on the possibility of machine consciousness.
Katja Valli, Antti Revonsuo, Outi Pälkäs, Kamaran Hassan Ismahil, Karsan Jelal Ali, and Raija-Leena Punamäki. The
Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, 2013
Significant debate on fundamental issues remains in the subfields of cognitive science, including... more 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...
Physics of Life Reviews, 2012
Natural phenomena are reducible to quantum events in principle, but quantum mechanics does not al... more Natural phenomena are reducible to quantum events in principle, but quantum mechanics does not always provide the best level of analysis. The many-body problem, chaotic avalanches, materials properties, biological organisms, and weather systems are better addressed at higher levels. Animals are highly organized, goal-directed, adaptive, selectionist, information-preserving, functionally redundant, multicellular, quasi-autonomous, highly mobile, reproducing, dissipative systems that conserve many fundamental features over remarkably long periods of time at the species level. Animal brains consist of massive, layered networks of specialized signaling cells with 10,000 communication points per cell, and interacting up to 1000 Hz. Neurons begin to divide and differentiate very early in gestation, and continue to develop until middle age. Waking brains operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium under delicate homeostatic control, making them extremely sensitive to a range of physical and chemical stimuli, highly adaptive, and able to produce a remarkable range of goal-relevant actions. Consciousness is "a difference that makes a difference" at the level of massive neuronal interactions in the most parallelinteractive anatomical structure of the mammalian brain, the cortico-thalamic (C-T) system. Other brain structures are not established to result in direct conscious experiences, at least in humans. However, indirect extra-cortical influences on the C-T system are pervasive. Learning, brain plasticity and major life adaptations may require conscious cognition. While brains evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and individual brains grow over months, years and decades, conscious events appear to have a duty cycle of ∼100 ms, fading after a few seconds. They can of course be refreshed by inner rehearsal, re-visualization, or attending to recurrent stimulus sources. These very distinctive brain events are needed when animals seek out and cope with new, unpredictable and highly valued life events, such as evading predators, gathering critical information, seeking mates and hunting prey. Attentional selection of conscious events can be observed behaviorally in animals showing coordinated receptor orienting, flexible responding, alertness, emotional reactions, seeking, motivation and curiosity, as well as behavioral surprise and cortical and autonomic arousal. Brain events corresponding to attentional selection are prominent and widespread. Attention generally results in conscious experiences, which may be needed to recruit widespread processing resources in the brain. Many neuronal processes never become conscious, such as the balance system of the inner ear. An air traveler may "see" the passenger cabin tilt downward as the plane tilts to descend for a landing. That visual experience occurs even at night, when the traveler has no external frame of spatial reference. The passenger's body tilt with respect to gravity is detected unconsciously via the hair cells of the vestibular canals, which act as liquid accelerometers. However, that sensory activity is not experienced directly.
International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 2009
The currently leading cognitive theory of consciousness, Global Workspace Theory , postulates tha... more The currently leading cognitive theory of consciousness, Global Workspace Theory , postulates that the primary functions of consciousness include a global broadcast serving to recruit internal resources with which to deal with the current situation and to modulate several types of learning. In addition, conscious experiences present current conditions and problems to a "self" system, an executive interpreter that is identifiable with brain structures like the frontal lobes and precuneus . Be it human, animal or artificial, an autonomous agent (Franklin and Graesser 1997) is said to be functionally consciousness if its control structure (mind) implements Global Workspace Theory and the LIDA Cognitive Cycle, which includes unconscious memory and control functions needed to integrate the conscious component of the system. We would therefore consider humans, many animals (Seth, Baars, and Edelman 2005) and even some virtual or robotic agents to be functionally consciousness. Such entities may approach phenomenal consciousness, as found in human and other biological brains, as additional brain-like features are added. Here we argue that adding mechanisms to produce a stable, coherent perceptual field (Merker 2005) in a LIDA controlled mobile robot might provide a small but significant step toward phenomenal consciousness in machines . We also propose that implementing several of the various notions of self in such a LIDA controlled robot may well prove another step toward phenomenal consciousness in machines.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2013
A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely... more A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling elements. In computational applications, GW architectures recruit many distributed, specialized agents to cooperate in resolving focal ambiguities. In the brain, conscious experiences may reflect a GW function. For animals, the natural world is full of unpredictable dangers and opportunities, suggesting a general adaptive pressure for brains to resolve focal ambiguities quickly and accurately. GW theory aims to understand the differences between conscious and unconscious brain events. In humans and related species the cortico-thalamic (C-T) core is believed to underlie conscious aspects of perception, thinking, learning, feelings of knowing (FOK), felt emotions, visual imagery, working memory, and executive control. Alternative theoretical perspectives are also discussed. The C-T core has many anatomical hubs, but conscious percepts are unitary and internally consistent at any given moment. Over time, conscious contents constitute a very large, open set. This suggests that a brain-based GW capacity cannot be localized in a single anatomical hub. Rather, it should be sought in a functional hub -a dynamic capacity for binding and propagation of neural signals over multiple task-related networks, a kind of neuronal cloud computing. In this view, conscious contents can arise in any region of the C-T core when multiple input streams settle on a winner-take-all equilibrium. The resulting conscious gestalt may ignite an any-to-many broadcast, lasting ∼100-200 ms, and trigger widespread adaptation in previously established networks. To account for the great range of conscious contents over time, the theory suggests an open repertoire of binding 1 coalitions that can broadcast via theta/gamma or alpha/gamma phase coupling, like radio channels competing for a narrow frequency band. Conscious moments are thought to hold only 1-4 unrelated items; this small focal capacity may be the biological price to pay for global access. Visuotopic maps in cortex specialize in features like color, retinal size, motion, object identity, and egocentric/allocentric framing, so that a binding coalition for the sight of a rolling billiard ball in nearby space may resonate among activity maps of LGN, V1-V4, MT, IT, as well as the dorsal stream. Spatiotopic activity maps can bind into coherent gestalts using adaptive resonance (reentry). Single neurons can join a dominant coalition by phase tuning to regional oscillations in the 4-12 Hz range. Sensory percepts may bind and broadcast from posterior cortex, while non-sensory FOKs may involve prefrontal and frontotemporal areas. The anatomy and physiology of the hippocampal complex suggest a GW architecture as well. In the intact brain the hippocampal complex may support conscious event organization as well as episodic memory storage.
Origins of Nonword Phonological Errors in Aphasic Picture Naming
Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2004
A recent theory of lexical access in picture naming maintains that all nonword errors are generat... more 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.
Why Volition is a Foundation Issue for Psychology
Conscious. Cogn, 1993
The Many Uses of Error: Twelve Steps to a Unified Framework
Experimental slip and human error: Exploring the …, 1992
APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser c... more APA PsycNET Our Apologies! - The following features are not available with your current Browser configuration. - alerts user that their session is about to expire - display, print, save, export, and email selected records - get My ...
AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium Series Sponsor: American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA, 2006
In an attempt to illustrate the application of cognitive science principles to hard AI problems i... more 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 ...
Uploads
Papers by Bernard J Baars
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,
1
APA