Overview
Access to consciousness, often termed access consciousness, refers to the aspect of mental life in which information is made available to the systems that guide reasoning, verbal report, decision-making, and the deliberate control of behavior. In philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, it is commonly distinguished from phenomenal consciousness, the subjective felt quality of experience; access consciousness concerns whether a mental state's content can be drawn upon and broadcast to other cognitive processes rather than how it feels. Content that is access-conscious can be used to direct attention, inform speech, and steer action, whereas information processed outside of access remains unavailable for such uses even if it influences behavior implicitly. Researchers investigate access to consciousness through studies of attention, working memory, perceptual awareness, and conditions in which information becomes inaccessible, using behavioral experiments and neuroimaging to identify when and how content enters the scope of report and control. Human Psychology provides a peer-reviewed, open-access venue for work across cognition, awareness, and mental function. This page gathers research relevant to access to consciousness and the broader study of awareness, attention, and the availability of mental content to thought and behavior.
Research published in this journal
3 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
Dissociative Amnesia – A Challenge to Therapy
How this research is being cited
The 3 articles above have been cited 33 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
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2026 · Journal of Medical Clinical Case Reports
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2025 · Kragujevac Journal of Science
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2025 · International Journal of Complementary Medicine
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2025 · Legal and Criminological Psychology
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2025 · Memory
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2025 · Springer eBooks
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Pamela J Radcliffe et al. · 2025 · Memory
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2025 · Translational Neuroscience
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Access to Consciousness, linking to each citing work.