The dominant action system

an information-processing approach to consciousness

Tim Shallice

pp. 117-157

in: Kenneth S. Pope, Jerome L. Singer (eds), The stream of consciousness, Berlin, Springer, 1978

Abstract

For 50 years theory in hard-core areas of Anglo-American psychology remained frozen into behaviorist and neo-behaviorist paradigms. In the thaw of the last 10 to 15 years the explanation of the existence and properties of consciousness has reemerged as an acceptable and important problem for cognitive theory. A wide diversity of views has been put forward but those cognitive psychologists who have discussed these issues have almost all accepted a materialist position and attempted to explain consciousness and its properties by using information-processing theories of human cognition (e.g., Miller, 1962; Hochberg, 1970; Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1971; Shallice, 1972; Posner and Klein, 1973; Mandler, 1975).