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Predictive Processing Framework

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The studies discussed above suggest that the late global ignition of a neural network of high-level brain areas accompanies conscious access. Still, these studies have little to say about why exactly one piece of information gains conscious access, while the other does not. Or put differently, because there is a limit to the content that can be consciously represented at a particular point in time (Dehaene & Changeux, 2011), the question is then what determines what exactly enters this limited capacity of consciousness. According to a recent proposition within the predictive processing framework, it is the unconscious perceptual inference that determines the content of consciousness (Hohwy, 2013). Specifically, conscious perception was proposed to be an “upshot of unconscious perceptual inference” (Hohwy, 2013, pp. …show more content…

The knowledge about regularities in the environment that is stored in generative models of the world is thought to be accessed automatically and then used according to principles of Bayesian inference to produce conscious perception (Hohwy, 2013; Ewbank & Henson, 2012; Barrlow, 1990). Some authors (Ewbank & Henson, 2012) argue that predictions within the predictive processing framework are automatic and intrinsic property of neural networks, which does not depend on conscious expectation. Certain statistical regularities underlying the occurrence of sensory events are so ubiquitous in the environment that they might be hardwired in the neural circuitry. For instance, stimulus A might precede stimulus B more often than would be expected by chance, and this conditional/predictive relationship between the two stimuli can be “encoded” in the brain. There are many examples of such predictive relationships between sensory events in the environment (e.g. the honking sound is associated with a car, even when the car is not seen), and introspectively it seems that those predictions require little conscious

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