• Introduction
• Introspection
• Mind and Body
• Attention and Automaticity
• The Explicit and the Implicit

• Lecture Illustrations, updated at the conclusion of each set of lectures.
• Lecture Supplements, which contain expanded versions of the lectures given in class.
• The Farthing text, The Psychology of Consciousness, which contains an excellent (if somewhat dated) survey of much of this material.  The Farthing book is not required reading, but it will be especially helpful for those who are perplexed by philosophical approaches to the mind-body problem.  And don't be distressed if Farthing, Revonsuo, and I use slightly different terms to refer to the same concepts.  As someone once said, psychologists would sooner use another's toothbrush than his vocabulary (though we're getting better about this).
• Copies of all past exams, with answers.  I don't typically repeat questions from year to year, but the topics I deem important don't change that much. 

• In the late 19th century, William James defined psychology as the science of mental life, by which he meant conscious mental life.  
• Psychophysics was concerned with the relations between the physical properties of stimuli and the conscious experiences to which those stimuli gave rise.
• Physiological psychology was concerned with the biological underpinnings of sensation and perception.
• The Structuralists employed the method of introspection to identify the basic building-blocks of conscious experience.  

• Positivistic reserve, or the idea that the behaviorists had a point, and psychologists should study objective, publicly observable phenomena;
• a piecemeal approach, the strategy of approaching consciousness indirectly, by figuring out how things like perception and memory work
• Conscious inessentialism, the idea that because mental functions can be performed both consciously and unconsciously, conscious isn't a necessary part of mental life;
• and the epiphenomenalist suspicion that conscious mental states play no causal role in behavior.

• Revonsuo's definition of a conscious being (p. xx).
• Why the natural sciences seem to have such a difficult time with consciousness (pp. xxi-xxii).
• The nature of converging evidence (p. 99).
• What is meant by a supervenience relation (p. 151) and the covariance principle (p. 152).
• Koch's definition of an NCC (p. 152).
• The nature of theory in science (p. 175).  

• You should know something about the properties of qualia, and the implications of Jackson's thought experiment concerning Mary, the "Color Scientist" (and "Fred, the Scientist with Super-Vision").
• You should know something about intentionality, or the idea that mental states are "about" something other than themselves. 
  • You should also know something about the problems of applying the criterion of intentionality to non-cognitive mental states -- i.e., that there are some mental states, like anxiety and hunger, that aren't "about" anything except themselves.  This is different from cognitive states, which appear always to be "about" the object of cognition.  
• You should know the difference between ontological and epistemic subjectivity.  The really interesting thing about conscious mental states, as John Searle points out, is that they have a subjective ontology, in that they exist only insofar as they are experienced by someone; but they are also observer-independent, in that your conscious states are yours no matter what anyone else thinks about them.  Again, a scientific approach to consciousness seeks to develop an epistemically objective account of ontologically subjective states.

• You should know how the various modalities of sensation are defined by Muller's Doctrine of Specific Nerve Energies.
• In principle, each sensory modality is associated with a particular proximal stimulus, sensory receptor, sensory tract, and sensory projection area in the brain.
  
• You should understand the difference between absolute and relative thresholds.
• You should know the Psychophysical Principle, and how it's expressed in the psychophysical laws. 
  • However, you don't have to know all the different laws themselves. 
    
  • It's enough to know that Weber's Law allows us to compare the acuity across different modalities of sensation and across different species;
    
  • and that Fechner's law states that sensation grows more slowly than stimulation.
  • Stevens' Law is the most general of all, and accommodates occasional exceptions to Fechner's Law.
    
• You should know how Helmholtz extended Muller's doctrine to qualities within each sensory modality, in his Doctrine of Specific Fiber Energies, and how that doctrine works out with respect to color vision.
• You should understand how the Structuralists used experimental introspection to identify the basic qualities of sensation within each modality, such as Henning's taste tetrahedron and smell prism.   
• The primary colors are models for the establishment of sensory qualia.  You should understand how the various features listed by Cutting help us determine what is, and what is not, a basic quale of experience. 
  
• As an exercise, you might consider how the sensory qualities identified by the structuralists -- sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes, for instance -- fare when held up to Cutting's criteria.

• The distinction between dualism and monism.
• The interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing.  
• Causal closure vs. Causal inertness.  
• The distinction between interactive dualism and epiphenomenalism, and the strengths and weaknesses of each position.
• The attraction and problems of psychophysical parallelism.
• Eliminative and reductive forms of materialism.
• Functionalism and arguments against it.
• The explanatory gap and the "hard problem" of consciousness.

Chapter 2

• Psychophysics as a scientific approach to consciousness.
• Wundt, Titchener, the program of Structuralism, and Gestalt arguments against it.
• James' description of the stream of consciousness.
• Why Watson wanted to get rid of consciousness as a problem for science.
• How cognitive science could be a science of the mind without being a science of consciousness.

Chapter 3:

• What qualia are.
• The distinction between being conscious and being conscious of something.
• The relation between attention and consciousness and why it's complicated.
• Change blindness, inattentional blindness, and their implications for the relationship between consciousness and attention (and, for that matter, their implications for implicit perception)
• Varieties of introspection, and whether introspections are accurate.
• The zombie argument and its implications
• Alternate definitions of consciousness and the difficulties they present.

• the different varieties of dualism, monism, and materialism, behaviorism and mysterianism,
  
• what it means to say that we are conscious automata,
  
• what epiphenomenalism entails;
• the issues surrounding "intertheoretic reductionism" and the move to dispense with "folk psychology" in favor of neuroscience. 
  
• You should also understand why, despite all the critiques, so many people find some form of dualism intuitively appealing. 
  

From Body to Mind

• For example, if you define consciousness as wakefulness, then the reticular activating system is the neural correlate of consciousness. 
  
• There are different loci of brain damage in coma, the persistent vegetative state, the minimally conscious state, and the locked-in syndrome.
• If you define consciousness as attention, you get a different set of correlates.
• And even these depend on what aspect of attention you're looking at: alerting and interruption, orienting and localizing, or executive control.
• If you define consciousness as working memory, then the correlate is somewhere in the prefrontal cortex.
  
• If you define consciousness as the experience of specific qualia, then the neural substrates of those qualities is given according to the Doctrine of Specific Fiber Energies. 
  
• If you define consciousness as intentionality, then the structures involved in priming amnesia, "blindsight", and other syndromes are relevant.  
• Thus, the hippocampus appears to be critical for at least some conscious memories.
• And primary visual cortex appears to be critical for conscious visual experience.
• And there appear to be different patterns of neural activity associated with particular conscious percepts, memories, feelings, and desires.
• Gallant and his colleagues seem to have been able to identify the unique pattern of neural activity associated with specific visual images.
  

From Mind to Body

• Ulcers aren't just caused by h. pylori infection, but are also caused by stress -- and stress is a mental state.
• Placebos are pharmacologically inert, but offer significant pain relief mediated by the patient's belief that they are active analgesic agents.
• Hypnotic and nonhypnotic suggestions can sometimes alter physiological responses to various challenges, such as the Mantoux reaction, allergies, and asthma.

1. The effects of mental state on another mental state, such as pain (which isn't really a psychosomatic effect).
2. The effects of mental state on central nervous system activity (which is ambiguous as evidence of psychosomatic interactions, because every mental state has to have some kind of neural correlate).
3. The effects of mental state on anatomy or physiology outside the central nervous system (and why only this last offers convincing evidence for psychosomatic interactions).
   

Mind Without Body

• Example "psi" phenomena, such as telepathy and precognition.
• Empirical and methodological problems with parapsychological research.
• The more rigorous the methodology, the less evidence there is for psi
• Out-of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences as putative evidence for the "survival of consciousness".
• How, at least in principle, the validity of NDEs might be assessed.
  

Bodies Without Minds

• A "philosopher's zombie" is a creature that is physiologically identical to humans, but lacks conscious experience.
• Daniel Dennett's "zimbo" is a zombie that believes it is conscious (which is what Dennett seems to think we are).
  
• What David Chalmers characterizes as a "Hollywood zombie" is a creature that simply lacks consciousness.
• Recent arguments for the automaticity of social behavior suggests that, in certain respects, we might be zombies after all.
  

In these chapters, Revonsuo focuses on the neural correlates of consciousness.

• PET and fMRI allow us to image brain activity directly, but differ in their temporal resolution.
• Signals from EEG and MEG are hard to localize precisely.

• Searle's introduction (Chapter 1) is particularly important, as it lays out his own position of biological naturalism..
• Less important are Chapters 2-4, and Chapter 7, though Crick's argument about 40-hertz synchronous firing is relevant to the issue of the neural correlates of consciousness (in fact, Crick introduced the very idea of NCCs); Penrose is responsible for the remarkably popular idea that consciousness is related to quantum mechanics, leading to the joke that he tries to explain one mystery with another. 
• The real meat of the book are the extended debates with Dennett and with Chalmers.
  • Chapter 5 deals with Dennett, and after reading it you should have a clear idea just why lots of people, not just Searle, think that Dennett denies the reality of consciousness.
  • Chapter 6 deals with Chalmers, and after reading it you should have a clear idea why Chalmers is a property dualist.

• limited capacity, selection, modulation, and vigilance;
• sensorial vs. intellectual, immediate vs. apperceptive, passive vs. active
• external vs. internal, voluntary vs. involuntary

• Dennett.
• UCB's Alva Noe, who argues that brains are necessary, but not sufficient, for consciousness.
• Searle, of course.
• Chalmers.

In either case, the classic demonstrations were criticized in part on the grounds that the investigators may not have determined thresholds properly --i.e., that what seemed to be "subliminal" stimuli were actually "supraliminal" after all, which is why subjects could respond to them.  Whatever the merits of the threshold-setting procedures in any individual case, you should understand that, underlying this criticism, is a behavioral definition of awareness in terms of discriminative response.  That is, conscious awareness is operationally defined in terms of the subject's ability to make a discriminative response to the stimulus -- if the subject responds discriminatively, then the subject is aware, by definition.  You should understand that the problem with this critique is that the evidence "subliminal" perception consists of the subject's discriminative response to a stimulus of which s/he is not consciously aware.  If conscious awareness is defined by discriminative response, then subliminal perception is ruled out by definition -- which doesn't seem fair, does it?

Simple tachistoscopic presentation isn't ideal for studies of "subliminal" perception, because iconic memory can allow a representation of the stimulus to persist after the stimulus itself has been terminated -- thus, effectively lengthening the duration of the stimulus.  Accordingly, the method of choice in modern studies of "subliminal" perception is to employ a "masking" stimulus which effectively erases the iconic representation.  If the stimulus is immediately followed by the mask (e.g., within 50 msec or so), subjects will have no conscious awareness of the stimulus.  At this point, standard priming techniques take over, and priming effects from masked primes constitute the standard evidence for implicit perception.  In part as a holdover from the old debate over the scope of preattentive processing, the best evidence for masked priming is semantic priming -- priming that must be mediated by a meaning-based representation of the stimulus.

• Marcel offered just such evidence in studies of masked associative priming (doctor-nurse) and the subliminal Stroop effect, in which subjects must name a color patch accompanied by a masked color word.  
• The subliminal Stroop effect was confirmed by Cheesman & Merikle, who made a further distinction between subjective and objective thresholds.  "Subliminal" perception occurs in the space between them.  On hypothesis, semantic priming can occur in regions close to the subjective threshold, while repetition priming can occur in regions close to the objective threshold. 

I prefer the term "implicit perception" to "subliminal" perception because unconscious perception can occur in situations where the stimulus is in no sense subliminal.

• Some of these situations involve brain damage. At the very least, you should know how each of these syndromes is defined.
  • "Blindsight" and similar disorders affecting other sensory modalities
  • Hemispatial Neglect
  • Prosopagnosia
• Other situations involve neurologically intact subjects. I didn't get to discuss these particular experiments, but Revonsuo talks about them to some extent.   The problem is that Revonsuo considers them only to represent lapses in consciousness.  I think a far more interesting question is whether there is implicit perception during inattentional blindness, etc.  
• Inattentional Blindness (Yes)
  
• Varieties of Attentional Blindness, including 
• Repetition Blindness (Yes)
  
• The Attentional Blink (Yes)
  
• Change Blindness (Unknown)

Even though there is good evidence for semantic priming in at least some forms of implicit perception, you should know that implicit perception is limited, both in terms of the duration of the effect, and in terms of the extent of semantic processing that can be performed preattentively.  

Implicit thought may be relevant to the sequence of incubation, intuition, and insight often encountered in studies of problem-solving.  That is, subjects may have an intuition or "gut feeling" about the solution to a problem; after an incubation period of rest or distraction, the solution emerges into consciousness as an insight.  If so, a reliance on intuition may not be such a bad strategy for problem-solving after all.  Although some theorists have cast doubt on the phenomenon of incubation, more recent research suggests that the concept might be viable after all.

These lectures focused on priming, and similar effects, as illustrations of unconscious cognition: implicit memory, perception, thought, and learning.  But, as Kant pointed out, there may be other mental states besides cognitive ones -- states of feeling and desiring as well as states of knowing.  If so, it is possible that we can have unconscious feelings and desires, which affect our experience, thought, and action even though we're not consciously aware of them.  

There is only limited evidence for unconscious emotions and motives, but the evidence for unconscious cognitions suggests that we should not dismiss the possibility out of hand.  So, in the last lecture, I talked about this work, focusing more on the case for implicit emotion than for implicit motivation -- for the simple reason that there's more research on implicit attitudes. 

Implicit motives, measured by tests such as the Thematic Apperception test ('Picture-Story Exercise") appear to be only weakly correlated with explicit motives, measured by traditional self-report personality questionnaires such as the Personality Research Form.  But this is only half the story. It might be that the lack of correlation reflects just "method variance", as opposed to a true dissociation.  And it might be that the explicit and implicit tests actually measure two different constructs.

Implicit emotion is anticipated by the multiple-systems theory of emotion, which suggests that verbal-cognitive (explicit, conscious) expressions of emotion might be dissociated from overt motor and/or covert physiological expressions (which might serve as measures of implicit, unconscious emotion.  This situation, known as desynchrony, is sometimes observed in clinical situations.  And LeDoux has suggested that the three emotional systems might be served by different brain systems. 

Most of the research on unconscious emotional states makes use of the Implicit Attitude Test.  The IAT is based on the principle of stimulus-response compatibility, and is promoted as a means of revealing unconscious attitudes that are different from those which a subject consciously acknowledges.  And, indeed, the correlation between explicit (self-report) and implicit (IAT) measures of the same attitude are relatively low.  But, as with TAT measures of implicit motives, this is only part of the story. 

• In the first place, the correlations in question aren't all that low. 
  
• In the second place, the IAT is contaminated by a host of confounding factors, such as target familiarity and the complementarity assumption.
• It's not clear whether the IAT measures the subject's own attitudes, as opposed to knowledge of social stereotypes.
• It's not clear whether the IAT measures unconscious attitudes, or rather attitudes which the subject wishes not to disclose.
• Studies employing Sherman's QUAD technique, a variant on Jacoby's PDP, indicate that automatic, unconscious processing plays only a limited role in subjects' responses on the IAT.  But I didn't get to lecture on this, so you're not responsible for it!
  

The bottom line is that dissociations between various aspects of explicit and implicit cognition (especially memory and perception) lend plausibility to the idea of unconscious motives and emotions, the jury's still out on the proposition that the TAT and IAT are valid measures of them.

• Visual achromatopsia, including the case of the color-blind painter which I discussed in the lectures on introspection (Revonsuo and I organize this material differently.  His organization is OK, but I like mine better, so you get both).
• Visual agnosia, of which I described the special case of prosopagnosia in lecture.
• Visual neglect, which I also discussed.

• The concept of a dissociation between explicit and implicit modes of processing.
• Blindsight.
• Evidence for "what" and "where" pathways in the visual system.
• Implicit face recognition in prosopagnosia.
• Implicit perception in visual neglect.