Introspection, consciousness, and human information processing

The paper tries, on rational and empirical grounds, to sketch a theory of introspective awareness, considered as an essential aspect of what is usually talked about in terms of “consciousness”. The main thesis is that introspective awareness has an important role of play in human information processing. An attempt is made to clarify the connections between introspective awareness, selective attention, and short‐term memory. A lot of human information processing goes on pre‐attentively, “automatically”, without the involvement of introspective awareness. What is introspectively attended to enters short‐term memory, where it remains available for various kinds of mental operations; certain kinds of such operations are themselves introspectively accessible, and may become contents of short‐term memory, where they in turn can be operated upon, and hence be modified voluntarily by the subject. Finally, various kinds of limitations to introspective awareness are discussed.