Rh. Phaf et G. Wolters, A CONSTRUCTIVIST AND CONNECTIONIST VIEW ON CONSCIOUS AND NONCONSCIOUSPROCESSES, Philosophical psychology, 10(3), 1997, pp. 287-307
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.