Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 23, Issue 9, September 2019, Pages 754-768
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Opinion
Understanding the Higher-Order Approach to Consciousness

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.06.009Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Misunderstandings about HOT have marginalized it relative to other approaches.

  • We clarify some of the key misunderstandings, including assumptions about the equivalence between consciousness and metacognition, and the role of introspection and the self.

  • We reply to several objections, including those concerning the nature of perception in the visual periphery and issues raised about the value of so-called ‘no report’ paradigms.

  • We also address issues regarding the involvement of prefrontal cortex, including questions about whether it is necessary, and whether its deactivation during dreams and psychedelic states is incompatible with it contributing to higher-order awareness.

  • We propose a reconceptualization of lower-order states that contribute to higher-order awareness, including states of prefrontal cortex and multimodal and mnemonic states processed in posterior cortical areas.

  • We provide arguments as to why the HOT of consciousness may be superior to both GWT and local recurrency theory regarding its ability to account for subjective experiences, especially of complex states such as memories and emotions that occur in everyday life and that are hallmarks of psychopathological conditions.

The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here, we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views, such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models (e.g., first-order local recurrency theories). For example, HOT has been criticized for overintellectualizing consciousness. We show that, while higher-order states are cognitively assembled, the requirements are in fact considerably less than often presumed. In this sense, HOT may be viewed as an intermediate position between GWT and early sensory views. We also clarify that most proponents of HOT do not stipulate consciousness as equivalent to metacognition or confidence. Furthermore, compared with other existing theories, HOT can arguably account better for complex everyday experiences, such as emotions and episodic memories. This makes HOT particularly useful as a framework for conceptualizing pathological mental states.

Keywords

consciousness
global workspace
prefrontal cortex
emotion
visual awareness

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