Spring 2008 Colloquia

Abstract

     The contents of human consciousness obviously change with age, and our interactions with the world clearly influence our ideas about self, subjectivity, volition, and other minds, among many related constructs. But it is more difficult to determine whether the quality of phenomenological experience is similarly transformed, or whether the cognitive and behavioural functions of consciousness change as children develop. In this talk, I argue that while a fundamental aspect of consciousness ("minimal consciousness") is developmentally invariant, the structure and functions of conscious experience do in fact develop, as minimal consciousness comes to participate in additional degrees of reflection, or the recursive reprocessing of the contents of minimal consciousness via neural circuits involving hierarchically arranged regions of prefrontal cortex.

      According to the levels of consciousness (LOC) model (e.g., Zelazo, 2004), development of prefrontal cortex is associated with several age-related increases in the highest degree of reflection, or level of consciousness, that infants and children are able to muster in response to situational demands. These increases in level of consciousness have important consequences for (1) the quality of experience, (2) the potential for recall, (3) the complexity of children's explicit knowledge structures, and (4) the possibility of the conscious control of thought, emotion, and action. In addition to reviewing neural and behavioral evidence for the model, I will emphasize the relevance of developmental data to our understanding of the functional significance of subjective experience in general.

Readings:

• Zelazo PD,( 2004) The development of conscious control in childhood, TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.8 No.1
  download 140kb pdf
  
  
• Bunge SA & Zelazo PD, (2006) A Brain-Based Account of the Development of Rule Use in Childhood, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 15 No. 3
  download 137kb pdf
  
  
• Cunningham WA and Zelazo PD, (2007) Attitudes and evaluations: a social cognitive neuroscience perspective, TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.11 No.3
  download 745kb pdf

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