title: Reappraising the relationship between working memory and conscious awareness.
abstract: Classically, the operation of working memory (WM) has been strongly coupled with conscious states; it is thought that WM operates on conscious input and that we are conscious of the contents and operations of WM. Here, we re-evaluate the relationship between WM and conscious awareness in light of current data and question the views that awareness is mandatory for the operation of WM and that WM contents are necessarily linked to experiential states that are consciously accessible for perceptual report. We propose a novel framework for the relationship between WM and conscious awareness.
authors: Imperial College London, Division of Brain Sciences, Charing Cross Campus, St Dunstan's Road, W6 8RP, London, UK. Electronic address: d.soto@imperial.ac.uk.
authors: David
authors: D
authors: Soto
authors: University of Westminster, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Psychology, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2HW, London, UK; Brain Research Unit, OV Lounasmaa Laboratory, Aalto University School of Science, Finland, 00076 Aalto, Finland.
authors: Juha
authors: J
authors: Silvanto
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: attention; awareness; cognitive control; consciousness; introspection; metacognition; neural recurrency; prefrontal; vision; working memory