William James’ greatest achievement is, arguably, his analysis of the fringe -- or, as he sometimes called it, transitive experience. In trying to understand this vague, elusive, often peripheral aspect of consciousness, James broke new ground. But in so doing he also began to lay down the first stratum of a radically new methodology, one that intersects first- and third-person findings in such a way that each is able to interrogate the other, and so further our understanding of both.

Reexamines the Western philosophical tradition, looking at the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self.

Examining one of the fundamental issues in cognitive psychology: How does our conscious experience come to be the way it is?

Modern psychology does not address the great variety of elements constituting subjective experience or the relations among them. This essay examines ideas on the fine structure of awareness and suggests a more precisely characterized set of variables, useful to all psychologists interested in awareness, whether their focus is on computer simulation, neuroscience, or clinical intervention. This view builds on William James' insight into the qualitative differences among the parts of subjective experience, a concept nearly forgotten until recently reinterpreted in contemporary (...) cognitive terms by Mangan. I review, revise, and expand these ideas, and suggest their application to self-monitoring in several domains, including metacognition, action, and emotion. Sharpening and extending the distinctions James drew among key descriptive aspects of awareness gives us a more differentiated vocabulary for research and theory. (shrink)

I was born in Philadelphia, in 1928. I stayed there until I went through undergraduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, then went on to Harvard for a couple of a years in a research fellowship, and graduate school. When I was done with that, went over to MIT, and I've been in Boston ever since, around Boston since about..

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such as (...) stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

When looking at a scene, observers feel that they see its entire structure in great detail and can immediately notice any changes in it. However, when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced: identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly. Identification is much faster when a verbal cue is provided, showing that poor visibility is not the cause of (...) this difficulty. Identification is also faster for objects mentioned in brief verbal descriptions of the scene. These results support the idea that observers never form a complete, detailed representation of their surroundings. In addition, results also indicate that attention is required to perceive change, and that in the absence of localized motion signals it is guided on the basis of high-level interest. (shrink)

This work offers a comprehensive picture of the dynamic natures of language and consciousness that will interest linguists, psychologists, literary scholars,...

This paper develops an empirically motivated theory of visual consciousness. It begins by outlining neuropsychological support for Jackendoff's (1987) hypothesis that visual consciousness involves mental representations at an intermediate level of processing. It then supplements that hypothesis with the further requirement that attention, which can come under the direction of high level representations, is also necessary for consciousness. The resulting theory is shown to have a number of philosophical consequences. If correct, higher-order thought accounts, the multiple drafts account, and the (...) widely held belief that sensation precedes perception will all be found wanting. The theory will also be used to illustrate and defend a methodology that fills the gulf between functionalists who ignore the brain and neural reductionists who repudiate functionalism. (shrink)