Measurement
To be fully comprehensive, measures of consciousness must not only define and distinguish between conscious and unconscious states, but must also provide a guide by which the conscious level, or extent of consciousness, can be determined. Measures of consciousness are each associated with particular theories.
Certain defining theories are included below:
Worldly discrimination theory asserts that any mental state that is manifested in behavior is conscious; thus, an organism is consciously aware of something in the world if it can discriminate it with choice behavior. Signal detection theory quantifies discriminability of a stimulus among a set of different stimuli. Integration theories focus on finding a divide between conscious and unconscious processes. According to integration theories, conscious contents are widely available to many cognitive and/or neural processes.
These theories are then accompanied with measures of the level of consciousness, which are subdivided into behavioral measures and physiological measures.
Read more about this topic: Primary Consciousness
Famous quotes containing the word measurement:
“That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)