Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionRe-representing consciousness: dissociations between experience and meta-consciousness
Section snippets
Dissociations between consciousness and meta-consciousness
Although it generally seems that we are aware of the contents of experience, various situations illustrate dissociations between having an experience and knowing that one is having that experience. Such dissociations are exemplified by the situation of suddenly realizing that your mind has wandered while reading. Although the contents of such mind-wandering episodes are certainly experienced, the explicit awareness that your mind has wandered appears temporarily absent, as evidenced by the
The relationship between non-conscious, conscious, and meta-conscious processes
Conscious and non-conscious cognitive activities occur continuously throughout our waking hours. Much of the monitoring of consciousness is carried out by non-conscious processes that track goals [8], select strategies [9], and modulate the contents of thought [10]. Periodically attention is directed towards explicitly assessing the contents of experience. The resulting meta-consciousness involves an explicit re-representation of consciousness in which one interprets, describes, or otherwise
Temporal dissociations
Temporal dissociations between consciousness and meta-consciousness are illustrated by cases in which the triggering of meta-consciousness causes one to assess aspects of experience that had previously eluded explicit appraisal.
Translation dissociations
If meta-consciousness requires re-representing the contents of consciousness, then, as with any recoding process, some information could get lost or become distorted in the translation. The likelihood of noise entering the translation process is particularly great when individuals (1) verbally reflect on inherently non-verbal experiences, and/or (2) assess ambiguous or subtle visceral signals.
Caveats and conclusions
Positing temporal and translation dissociations between experience and meta-consciousness can provide new perspectives on many phenomena. Nevertheless, at least some of the phenomena discussed here can, in principle, be explained without invoking meta-consciousness. For example, zoning-out during reading might occur because individuals forget the goal of understanding what they are reading. And subliminal priming of negative affect could alter the motivation to engage in mood repair rather than
Questions for future research
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What is the relationship between language and meta-consciousness? Does meta-consciousness need to be verbal or in some symbolic form?
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When are individuals completely unaware of the contents of their experience? Can experience sampling combined with self-reporting determine when individuals are most or least likely to be meta-conscious?
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What situations prompt the induction of meta-consciousness? Is meta-consciousness cue-dependent or is there an inherent intermittent monitoring process?
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Can people
Acknowledgements
The writing and research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the Fetzer Institute, through the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. The author wishes to thank Sonya Dougal, David Halpern, Erik Reichle, Charles Schreiber, Carmi Schooler, Lael Schooler and Nina Schooler for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This paper also benefited from extensive conversations with Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Wegner.
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