shut out from accessing the global workspace and only one winner emerges,
imposing its contents on the global workspace (Shana han 2012). This moment
corresponds to the end of the interpretative part of the process and is known
as a global broadcast: a unifi ed, disambiguated conception of the world that
corresponds to an instant of conscious awareness. A global broadcast entails a
coherent episode of widespread activation that provides a new input for local-
ized processors to start the whole interpretative process anew, making the regime
of the winning coalition collapse whenever another coalition gets strong enough
to occupy the global workspace (Figure 7.2).
Central cognition, therefore, works in a cyclic fashion, an observation that is
captured by the concept of the cognitive cycle, a unit of consciousness that has
been purported to last between 260–390ms (Madl et al. 2011). Within the
model, it is assumed that higher-order cognitive tasks are carried out by the
coherent integration of multiple cognitive cycles. The cognitive control functions
of WM, therefore, can be reduced to the enabling of this integration, transform-
ing parallel, localized activation into a serial, interconnected mode of thought
that can be sustained long enough to solve cognitive tasks, i.e. that is adaptive.
WM, in short, is a selective serializer.
How well do the concepts that we extracted from the multicomponent model
resist this bottom-up approach? One of the fi rst things that should be obvious
is that within the global workspace account there is not a clear inclusion of
attention, much less of top-down or volitional attention. Solving the problem
of free will is beyond the scope of this short paper, but it can be assumed that
the setting of goals also works in the same bottom-up fashion as the rest of
cognition, forming coalitions that compete and fi nally broadcast their contents
Figure 7.2 The global workspace model (adapted from Frank lin et al. 2012). A
localized processor forms a coalition strong enough to occupy the global
workspace and broadcast its contents to all other processors.
Language and working memory 107