Hidden in Plain Sight: The Genesis of Conscious Experience from Statistical Regularities

Objetivo

Our mind constantly extracts the patterns and regularities from the environment, in a process called implicit statistical learning (ISL). Yet, humans often struggle to describe the acquired patterns; consider, for instance, the grammatical rules we effortlessly use. Indeed, empirical research shows that ISL exhibits multiple markers of unconscious operation. However, at the same time, humans invariably form partial conscious representations of what they learned. This paradox, in which conscious knowledge emerges from processes that appear unconscious, makes the relation between ISL and awareness deeply controversial.

GENESIS offers a novel solution, advancing the idea that conscious knowledge is not produced by learning itself but by a post-hoc redescription process through which the mind interprets its own unconscious computations. Thus, the paradoxical relation between awareness and ISL becomes an opportunity to investigate the mechanisms that generate awareness, under conditions of a naturally occurring representational mismatch. Specifically, GENESIS proposes that, whereas ISL builds a complex network of distributed memory traces, consciousness emerges by compressing and redescribing these traces into a simpler symbolic format. Thus, the resulting conscious contents may often diverge from the underlying knowledge acquired through ISL.

In a rich and interdisciplinary research programme combining behavioural paradigms, psychophysiology, kinematic analyses, and computational modelling, GENESIS will provide a fresh perspective on unconscious processing, conscious misrepresentation, and, more importantly, on the mechanisms that generate our conscious experience. Ultimately, GENESIS will establish a radically new empirical and theoretical framework for understanding the relation between conscious and unconscious representations that shape the human mind.

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