The aim of our commentary is to strengthen Cowan's proposal for an inherent capacity limitation in STM by suggesting a neurobiological mechanism based on competitive networks and nonlinear oscillations that avoids some of the shortcomings of the scheme discussed in the target article (Lisman & Idiart 1995).

The Global Workspace theory of consciousness explains conscious-unconscious dichotomies in cognitive processing in the context of a proposal about the qualitative properties of the architecture of cognition . This represents a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of consciousness which, as I will argue in this commentary, has at least two major advantages. A first advantage is that GW theory as a proposal about the architecture of cognition has the potential to explain consciousness-related phenomena in mechanistic terms, thereby avoiding (...) the homunculus problem. A second advantage is that GW theory makes explicit use of conscious-unconscious dichotomies to specify a proposal about the architecture of cognition, thereby using an extra source of constraint which proponents of computational instantiations of such architectures have largely ignored in the past. (shrink)