Reappraising the relationship between working memory and conscious awareness

Abstract

Classically, the operation of working memory (WM) has been strongly coupled with conscious states; it is thought that WM operates on conscious input and that we are conscious of the contents and operations of WM. Here, we re-evaluate the relationship between WM and conscious awareness in light of current data and question the views that awareness is mandatory for the operation of WM and that WM contents are necessarily linked to experiential states that are consciously accessible for perceptual report. We propose a novel framework for the relationship between WM and conscious awareness.

Keywords: attention; awareness; cognitive control; consciousness; introspection; metacognition; neural recurrency; prefrontal; vision; working memory.