Learning of all kinds is surely the most obvious adaptive mental process in which people engage. To learn something deliberately, we typically act to become conscious of the material to be learned. But most details of learning are unconscious.   Information and learning are closely related. The most widely accepted model of classical conditioning is defined in terms of informative features of the conditioned stimulus. Recent "connectionist" models of human learning also rely on mathematical rules that maximize the amount of information given by one event about another.  These models do not have an explicit role for conscious experience. However, they may be moving in that direction.                

                    From a theoretical point of view, we expect consciousness to be involved in  learning of novel events, or novel connections between known events. The rationale is of course that novel connections require unpredictable interactions between specialized processors. Hence global communication from "any" specialist to "any other" is necessary. Widespread broadcasting serves to make this any-any connection.  What is the evidence for this claim? Perhaps the most obvious is the radical simplicity of the act of learning. To learn anything new we merely pay attention to it. Learning occurs "magically" --- we merely allow ourselves to interact consciously with algebra, with language, or with a perceptual puzzle like the Dalmatian, and somehow, without detailed conscious intervention, we acquire the relevant knowledge and skill. But of course we know that learning cannot be a simple, unitary process in its details. The Dalmatian requires subtle and sophisticated visual and spatial analysis; language requires highly specialized analysis of sound and syntax; indeed all forms of learning involve specialized components, sources of knowledge, and acquisition strategies. Of course these specifics of learning are unconscious when they operate most effectively.                

                   The key step in deliberate learning is to become conscious of what is to be learned. Doing this is sufficient to learn, as shown by many studies of recognition memory. In general, if people are just made to pay attention to some material as an incidental task, recognition memory for the material will be quite good, even a week later, provided that the material is distinctive enough not be confused with very similar material. Thus consciousness seems to lead to learning.

Whether consciousness is a necessary condition‹ for learning is a more difficult question, discussed below. Finally, we are driven by our theoretical position to a rather radical position about most learning. Very often, the end product of learning is a change in the context of experience; but we know that a change in context in its turn alters subsequent experience. It follows that learning alters the conscious experience of the learned material. Evidence for this position seems strong for perceptual learning, knowledge acquisition, skill learning, immediate memory, episodic memory, and rule learning. It may be more debatable for associative learning. We explore this claim next.                        

                  Learning alters the experience of the material learned.

                    If it is true that learning involves the generation of new contexts, and if contexts shape and bound new conscious experiences, it follows that we experience the same materials in a different way after learning.‹ Is there evidence for this implication? Certainly we talk about algebra as "the same thing" before and after we learning it, just as we talk about the Dalmatian demonstration (above) as the same "thing" before and after comprehension. But both algebra and the Dalmatian are experienced differently after learning. Perceptual learning certainly changes the experience of the stimulus. Children are thought to experience the perceptual world differently after acquiring object permanence.  Native speakers of a language can often discriminate phonetic distinctions which foreigners cannot hear: Most English speakers simply cannot hear the Chinese tonal system. What about associative learning? When we need to discover  the connection between two known stimuli, or between a known stimulus and a known response, is there a change in conscious experience? This is not so clear. Perhaps the strongest evidence in favor of a change in experience comes from a series of brilliant studies by Dawson and Furedy. These researchers showed that human GSR conditioning did not occur if subjects misinterpreted the relationship between the conditioning stimuli. In standard GSR conditioning a stimulus is given, such as a tone, and followed by a shock which elicits a change in skin conductivity (GSR). Dawson and Furedy provided this stimulus situation, and normal conditioning occurred. But now they changed the subject's mental set about the stimulus sequence. Subjects were told that the task was to detect a tone in noise, and that the function of the shock was to mark the boundaries of the trials. (Experimental subjects will believe almost anything.) That is, they took the stimulus conditions (tone-shock, tone- shock, tone-shock) and made the subjects think of them in the opposite way (shock-tone, shock-tone, shock-tone). Under these circumstances, the tone no longer serves as a signal for the shock. And indeed, even though the stimulus conditions were unchanged, conditioning failed to take place.               

                    What does this mean for the question of changing experience? We still do not know whether associative learning changes the experience of the learned connection. However, the Dawson and Griggs studies show that if we experience stimuli such as way that the tone does not seem to signal the coming of the shock,  learning will not occur. It may be therefore that the distinction between associative learning and knowledge acquisition is a false distinction: all learning takes places within a knowledge context that defines the relationships between the stimuli. If that is true, then it seems likely that learning changes this knowledge context even in the case of associative learning.       

                    This somewhat radical hypothesis about learning has a perplexing implication. Namely, if we experience an event differently after learning, why do we still think it is the same event? That is, how do we maintain Œevent identity‹ before and after learning? This is a profound and difficult question, which was raised by William James. It is also the question raised by Kuhn  about scientific constructs after a paradigm shift. Indeed, scientific constructs like gravity and light are quite different in Relativity Theory compared to Newtonian physics: yet they are called by the same names, and they are naively believed to be the same things.  Many of physical observations relevant to light and gravity are unchanged, of course, but not all. And some new relationships are added with the coming of Relativity Theory: the bending of light by gravity, for example. Nonetheless, "construct identity" is maintained, at least in the sense that many physicists believe that in the Einsteinian framework they are simply understanding "the same thing" in a deeper way. The general implication is that event identity is a function not only of the observations in question, but of the entire knowledge context in which it is defined. This is not just true in physics, but in perception, in conceptual learning, and perhaps in learning in general.          

                    The developmental role of forgotten conscious choice-points.       

                    There is another interesting implication of the hypothesis that learning changes the experience of the learned material. Any developmental process must involve choice-points between different potential paths. We may choose to learn to play piano at the age of six; if not, we are unlikely to become concert pianists. We may choose to distrust certain people at an early age as a result of traumatic experiences, and thus avoid finding out that our distrust is unjustified. And so on. At the moment of choice, we may be quite conscious of the alternatives; once having chosen, we enter a new context that is created by the choice, and within which the choice is often not even defined. Once having learned algebra, it is extremely difficult to re-experience the confusion that was once so common about meaningless algebraic symbols on a page. Thus we often cannot make previous choice-points conscious once we have entered the new context created by those choice-points. We are utterly at the mercy of our previous choices, and we cannot undo them.  This suggests that learning, and its consequent alteration in experience, is never fully reversible. This is a point with  major consequences for developmental psychology.      

Is consciousness necessary for learning?         

                    The fact that learning begins with a conscious experience  is known to every parent and teacher who has ever tried to reach distractable children. In daily life this is what the term "attention" means: it involves an attempt to control what shall become conscious . In the psychology laboratory we always call the attention of subjects to whatever is to be learned. But somehow the salience of this plain everyday fact has escaped the notice of many researchers, in part because it has been superseded by a controversy: that is the question whether consciousness is a necessary condition for learning. This controversy has been difficult to resolve conclusively, in good part because it raises the difficult question of defining empirically the "zero point" about consciousness. We have previously remarked on this difficulty, and on the importance of developing a theoretical approach that does not require a solution to this extremely problematic question. Unfortunately in the case of learning, most discussion of the role of consciousness seems to be assimilated to the "necessary condition" question. But even if conscious experience were not a necessary condition but only a helpful adjunct  to the learning process, it would be difficult to doubt that in the real world consciousness and learning are very close companions. Thus the controversy about the necessity of consciousness tends to interfere with a more subtle question about the role consciousness plays in most cases of learning. We will not review the learning controversy here; we raise it merely to point out that whatever the answer may be to that question, it does not negate the plain fact that most of the time when we want to learn something we make ourselves conscious of the material to be learned.              

                    In order to avoid the unresolvable "zero-point" question, we suggest a more answerable one:  Do we need more conscious involvement to learn more information? It seems likely that  routine and predictable information may be learned with minimal conscious involvement. The more novelty we must absorb, the more conscious experience we need. The evidence for this claim seems to be widespread and non-controversial: the more words that need to be memorized, the longer we must pay attention. The more difficult and novel some material is, the more we time we must spend being conscious of all its details and implications.  Notice that the zero point of the curve is undefined, reflecting the difficulty of deciding whether consciousness is a sine qua non of learning. The figure suggests that we do not need to solve this problem in order to make interesting claims about the relationship between learning and consciousness.                                  

               
              Some experimental predictions.

                    The key to theoretical success, of course, is making novel predictions that work. Here are some possibilities. We have made the claim above that semantic satiation is one source of evidence for the generality of redundancy phenomena. In fact, it is difficult to do clean experiments with semantic satiation. For example, we do not know for sure that semantic satiation is an abstract rather than a perceptual event, because when we repeat a word over and over again, both the meaning and the perceptual stimulus are repeated. To prove that semantic satiation is indeed semantic we would have to repeat different synonyms or paraphrases with the same conceptual meaning but different perceptual form, and show that satiation occurs. Reddy and Newell cite more than 100 paraphrases of a single sentence about a chess position. If we repeat all l00 paraphrases, we should expect to find semantic satiation if this is a truly conceptual, as opposed to perceptual, phenomenon.    How is automatization of skills related to stimulus habituation? They seem to be so similar, it is intriguing to wonder about a connection. One possibility is that skilled actions are guided by conscious and quasi-conscious goal images. If that is so, perhaps automatization of skills simply involves habituation of the relevant goal images. This hypothesis may deserve further study.                

                    Finally, it will be worth investigating the relationship between information to be learned and the amount of conscious involvement, using carefully designed stimuli with known information content. This should cast light on the heated issue of the relationship between consciousness and learning without raising the inherent methodological difficulties involved in seeking the "zero point" of consciousness.  

     Subliminal perception  

                    There are two ways to model "subliminal" or unreportable  input in the GW model. First, if the input is routine, a perceptual system may analyze it without recourse to the global workspace. The second possibility is that the GW may be used for very rapid exchanges of information, and that linguistic and recall systems that can report conscious experiences  simply do not  have time to register this rapid global information. This is similar to the Sperling (1960) phenomenon, where stimuli are conscious briefly but cannot be recalled afterwards. In the second case a limited amount of novel processing could be done, provided that other specialists in the system can react to the global information more quickly than the linguistic and recall specialists. Again, these alternatives are extraordinarily difficult to test with our present methodology, but they are worth pointing out. We have now finished considering the meaning of a  "conscious experience." The following chapters will focus on the relationships between multiple conscious events.  This allows us to deal with issues like problem incubation, voluntary control, and conscious access to abstractions that are not experienced qualitatively.   This work has explored the fundamental phenomena of habituation and automatization. We have argued that all conscious contents must be informative, in that they trigger widespread adaptive processes. Receiving specialists must feed back their interest in the conscious content, so that they join the coalition of systems that support the content.  All conscious experiences, it is argued, involve a stage of adaptation in which a defining context has been accessed, so that the conscious information can be understood; but not all degrees of freedom have been determined. Consciousness occurs during the stage where the remaining uncertainty in the defining context is being reduced. After that point, adaptation has taken place, and repetition of the same input will not result in a conscious experience. There is thus an intimate connection between consciousness, adaptation, information, reduction of uncertainty, redundancy, and context.                

                    Information that fades from consciousness does not disappear; rather, it serves to constrain later conscious experiences. It may become part of a new unconscious context, within which later experiences are defined‹. One implication is that every event is experienced with respect to prior conscious events: "Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues..." as James says so eloquently in our epigraph.                

                    The more information we must adapt to, the longer we need to be conscious of the material in order to create new contexts for dealing with it; and the more new contexts we create, the more our subsequent experiences will be reshaped. This suggests an unconventional  view of learning and development. Namely, learning becomes a matter of developing contexts that cause us to experience the same reality in new and different ways. We have explored the evidence for this somewhat radical proposal.                

                    In the upshot, this chapter suggests a third determining condition for conscious experience, on  a par with global broadcasting and internal consistency . Namely: to be conscious,  a potential experience must be informative. Even the biological and personal significance of an event can be treated as its informativeness in a goal context. This point allows GW theory to deal with the issue of significance,  a point that is often neglected in the current cognitive literature.   Thus we are compelled to view even a single conscious experience as part of  a dynamic, developmental process of learning and adaptation. Increasingly it seems that the system underlying conscious experience is our primary organ of adaptation.

                    In the following chapter we will explore the ways in which

contexts help to achieve goals.  Much of our consciousness involves thoughts about goals, ways of achieving goals, failures to achieve them,  and the like. In ordinary life, as in the psychological laboratory, we are always asking peole to do some task by given them a goal. "I would like you to listen for a tone (goal), and to press this button (subgoal) with your right hand (subgoal) as quickly as you can (subgoal) when you hear one."  But people are never conscious at any one time of all the details of motivation, levels of planning and motor control, timing, testing of plans, and the like, which are needed to reach even a simple goal. The bulk of our goalcrelated processes are unconscious at any one time, even though they shape our action and experience; that is to say, they are mostly contextual. We show in the next chapter that some simple assumptions about goal contexts and conscious events leads to an understanding of the stream of consciousness --- the "flights" and "perches" of the mind from one apparently unrelated experience to another. 

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