A CONSTRUCTIVIST AND CONNECTIONIST VIEW ON CONSCIOUS AND NONCONSCIOUSPROCESSES

Recent experimental findings reveal dissociations of conscious and non conscious performance in many fields of psychological research, sugges ting that conscious and nonconscious effects result from qualitatively different processes. A connectionist view of these processes is put f orward in which consciousness is the consequence of construction proce sses taking place in three types of working memory in a specific type of recurrent neural network. The recurrences arise by feeding back out put to the input of a central (representational) network. They are ass umed to be internalizations of motor-sensory feedback through the envi ronment In this manner, a subvocal-phonological, a visuo-spatial, and a somatosensory working memory may have developed Representations in t he central network, which constitutes long-term memory, can be kept ac tive by rehearsal in the feedback loops. The sequentially recurrent ar chitecture allows for recursive symbolic operations and the formation of (auditory, visual, or somatic) models of the external world which c an be maintained, transformed and temporarily combined with other info rmation in working memory. Moreover, the quasi-input from the loop dir ects subsequent attentional processing. The view may contribute to a f ormal framework to accommodate findings from disparate fields such as working memory, sequential reasoning, and conscious and nonconscious p rocesses in memory and emotion. In theory, but probably not very soon in practice, such connectionist models might simulate aspects of consc iousness.