Global Workspace Model

<p>Jan 7, 2009 11:01 PM

&#160;

Baars’ <a title="Global workspace theory" href="/article/Global_workspace_theory">global workspace theory</a> (GW; Baars 1988) has inspired a variety of related consciousness models. The central idea of GW theory is that conscious cognitive content is globally available for diverse cognitive processes including <a title="Attention" href="/article/Attention">attention</a>, evaluation, <a title="Memory" href="/article/Memory">memory</a>, and verbal report. The notion of global availability is suggested to explain the association of consciousness with integrative cognitive processes such as <a title="Attention" href="/article/Attention">attention</a>, <a title="Decision making (stub)" href="/article/Decision_making" class="stub">decision making</a> and <a title="Action selection" href="/article/Action_selection">action selection</a>. Also, because global availability is necessarily limited to a single stream of content, GW theory may naturally account for the serial nature of conscious experience.

&#160;

In this model, sensory stimuli mobilize excitatory <a title="Neuron" href="/article/Neuron">neurons</a> with long-range <a title="Cortex" href="/article/Cortex">cortico-cortical</a> <a title="Axon" href="/article/Axon">axons</a>, leading to the <a title="GENESIS (stub)" href="/article/Genesis" class="stub">genesis</a> of a global activity pattern among workspace neurons. Any such global pattern can inhibit alternative activity patterns among workspace neurons, thus preventing the conscious processing of alternative stimuli</p>