Emotion, higher-order syntactic thoughts, and consciousness

emphasizes the role of working memory in consciousness, where he views working memory as a limited capacity serial processor that creates and manipulates symbolic representations (p 280). He thus holds that much emotional processing is unconscious, and that when it becomes conscious it is because emotional information is entered into a working memory system. However, LeDoux (1996) concedes that consciousness, especially its phenomenal or subjective nature, is not completely explained by the computational processes that underlie working memory (p. 281). LeDoux (2007) notes that the term working memory can refer to a number of different processes. In top-down attentional processing, a short-term memory is needed to hold online the subject of the attention, for example the position in space at which an object must be identified, or the object that must be found (Rolls and Deco 2002; Rolls 2008). There is much evidence that this short-term memory is implemented in the prefrontal cortex by an attractor network implemented by associatively modifiable recurrent collateral connections between cortical pyramidal cells, which keep the population active during the attentional task (Rolls 2008). This short-term memory then biases posterior perceptual and memory networks in the temporal and parietal lobes in a biased competition process The operation of this type of short-term memory acting using biased competition to implement top-down attention does not appear to be central to consciousness, for as LeDoux (2007) agrees, prefrontal cortex lesions that have major effects on attention and short-term memory do not impair subjective feelings of consciousness (Rolls 2008). Thus in the absence of any top-down modulation from a short-term