Consciouness

Type :

Research papers

Pages :

8 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

11/13/2007

Category :

Social studies

Sub category :

Psychology

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Summary :

Introduction
Conscious awareness
Misidentification syndromes
A profound sense of discontinuity and confusion
Thought, language and cognition
1. The mental representation of some aspect of the world
2. Psycholinguistics
3. Modes of Processing
4. Contrasting modes of processing
The processing of emotion
Discourse and narrative discourse
Cognitive development
Psychiatric disturbances in cognition
Conceptualizing psychiatric disturbances
Emotion
Conclusion
Basic references

Abstract

The vast majority of mental processes are outside of conscious awareness. These processes can impact thinking, feeling, and behavior despite the lack of conscious awareness. Consciousness can be thought to include two elements: awareness and sentience, the quality of the experience. Each form of consciousness has intrigued philosophers and scientists for many years and various theories have been proposed to explain these phenomena. Little is known about the basic mechanisms that underlie the sentient experience of consciousness. Phenomenal awareness has been the focus of active research and has yielded some basic ideas about the role of consciousness in cognition. One essential issue is that the effective processing of mental representations does not require conscious awareness. However, the intentional, strategic alteration in patterns of processing may necessitate the involvement of consciousness in order to achieve a new outcome. Thus, consciousness is not required for most processes, but its involvement allows for a qualitatively different result in representational transformations. One example of this is in memory processing in which explicit memory requires focal, conscious attention or awareness in order to encode events into explicit form. Such representations are later available for conscious retrieval when they can be examined and transformed for intentional purposes, such as the recollection of facts or autobiographical knowledge.