Learning and consciousness (Prof Axel Cleeremans)

The 2006 Whitehead Lectures on Cognition, Computation & Creativity

One way to approach the problem of consciousness involves exploring the differences between conscious and unconscious cognition. Striking dissociations between subjective experience and behavior have now been reported in various domains from memory to learning, from perception to action. Yet, the extent to which information processing can take place without consciousness remains controversial, in part because of the substantial methodological challenges associated with demonstrating unconscious cognition, in part because of conceptual differences in the manner in which such dissociations are interpreted. In this talk, I overview recent relevant findings, and sketch a novel conceptual framework that takes it as a starting point that conscious and unconscious cognition are rooted in the same set of learning and processing mechanisms. On this view, the extent to which a representation is conscious depends in a graded manner on properties such as its stability in time or its strength. Crucially, these properties are accrued as a result of learning, which is in turn viewed as a mandatory process that always accompanies information processing. In this light, I will report on several recent experiments in which we manipulated the temporal relationships between events and show that such manipulations influence the extent to which learning is conscious or not. A first implication of these ideas is that consciousness takes time. A second is that the main function of consciousness is to make flexible adaptive control over behavior possible. A third, much more speculative implication, is that we learn to be conscious. The conscious self, from this perspective, involves a ‘virtual other’ simulated by your brain as a result of having learned about the consequences of actions directed towards other agents over life-long interactions with them. I conclude that while learning without consciousness is definitely possible, consciousness without learning is not.

Axel Cleeremans, Ph.D. (1991), is a Professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a Research Director with the National Fund for Scientific Research (Belgium). Cleeremans currently heads the Cognitive Science Research Unit at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and coordinates an advanced degree in Cognitive Science. Trained in neural network modeling at Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of J.L. McClelland, Cleeremans' main research interests are in understanding the differences between learning with and without consciousness, and, more generally, in the mechanisms that underpin consciousness itself. Cleeremans currently acts as president of the Belgian Association for Psychological Science, and is also a member of the executive committee of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and of the board of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology.

The 2006 Whitehead Lectures on Cognition, Computation & Creativity

Dates & times

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18 Oct 2006	4:00pm - 5:00pm	apple google outlook

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