Global workspace theory (GWT) is a framework for thinking about consciousness proposed by cognitive scientists Bernard Baars and Stan Franklin in the late 1980s.
GWT has been influential in modeling consciousness and higher-order cognition as emerging from competition and integrated flows of information across widespread, parallel neural processes.
[2] When sensory input, memories, or internal representations receive attention, they enter the global workspace and become accessible to various cognitive processes.
As elements compete for attention, those that succeed gain entry to the global workspace, allowing their information to be distributed and coordinated throughout the whole cognitive system.
It serves as a central information exchange, rather than a locus of cognition itself, enabling different specialized brain networks to interact and supporting integrated and adaptive responses.
"[8] Recent research offers preliminary evidence for such a buffer store and indicates a gradual but rapid decay with extraction of meaningful information severely impaired after 300 ms and most data being completely lost after 700 ms.[9] Baars (1997) suggests that the global workspace "is closely related to conscious experience, though not identical to it."
Conscious events may involve more necessary conditions, such as interacting with a "self" system, and an executive interpreter in the brain, such as has been suggested by a number of authors including Michael S. Gazzaniga.
Nevertheless, GWT can successfully model a number of characteristics of consciousness, such as its role in handling novel situations, its limited capacity, its sequential nature, and its ability to trigger a vast range of unconscious brain processes.
Alternatively, the theory of practopoiesis suggests that the global workspace is achieved in the brain primarily through fast adaptive mechanisms of nerve cells.
[15] New work by Richard Robinson shows promise in establishing the brain functions involved in this model and may help shed light on how we understand signs or symbols and reference these to our semiotic registers.