文档介绍：S. Dehaene, L. ache / Cognition 79 (2001) 1±37 1
COGNITION
Cognition 79 (2001) 1±37
ate/cognit
Towards a cognitive neuroscience of
consciousness: basic evidence and a
workspace framework
Stanislas Dehaene*, Lionel ache
Unite INSERM 334, Service Hospitalier FreÂdeÂric Joliot, CEA/DRM/DSV, 4, Place du GeÂneÂral Leclerc,
91401 Orsay Cedex, France
Received 8 February 2000; accepted 27 September 2000
Abstract
This introductory chapter attempts to clarify the philosophical, empirical, and theoretical
bases on which a cognitive neuroscience approach to consciousness can be founded. We
isolate three major empirical observations that any theory of consciousness should incorpo-
rate, namely (1) a considerable amount of processing is possible without consciousness, (2)
attention is a prerequisite of consciousness, and (3) consciousness is required for some
speci®c cognitive tasks, including those that require durable information maintenance,
binations of operations, or the spontaneous generation of intentional behavior.
We then propose a theoretical framework that synthesizes those facts: the hypothesis of a
global neuronal workspace. This framework postulates that, at any given time, many modular
works are active in parallel and process information in an unconscious manner. An
information es conscious, however, if the neural population that represents it is mobi-
lized by top-down attentional ampli®cation into a brain-scale state of coherent activity that
involves many neurons distributed throughout the brain. The long-distance connectivity of
these `workspace neurons' can, when they are active for a minimal duration, make the
information available to a variety of processes including perceptual categorization, long-
term memorization, evaluation, and intentional action. We postulate that this global avail-
ability of information through the workspace is what we subjectively experience as a
conscious state. plete theory of consciousness