ABSTRACT
The invitation to participate in the 25th Carnegie Symposium on Cognition asked participants to consider fundamental issues of consciousness and encouraged us to “let our hair down.” We signed up for the task because the company was good and, like many cognitive labs, our lab has always worked on consciousness, whether or not we called it that. That is, we have explored questions about the properties and conditions of certain subjective, mental experiences. For example, what distinguishes simply processing syntax and word meanings from the dramatically different phenomenal experience of comprehending prose (Bransford & Johnson, 1973)? What phenomenal qualities lead people to believe some mental experiences derive from actual, autobiographical events and not from imagination or inference (Johnson & Raye, 1981)? The phenomenal experiences of understanding and remembering certainly are part of what is meant by consciousness.
