The Doctrine of Concordance is the assumption that cognitive processes, behavior, and conscious experience are tightly linked. Tulving and Schwartz challenged this, showing that conscious experience can be absent during cognitive tasks or uncorrelated with behavior. Despite progress, some memory research—particularly on dual- vs. single-process theories of recognition memory, remember/know judgments, and retrospective confidence—still implicitly endorses this doctrine. In contrast, research on metacognitive disconnects in learning, recognition illusions, déjà vu, and aha experiences demonstrates dissociations between the mechanisms creating conscious experience and underlying cognitive processes. Understanding these dissociations is key to grasping how the mind operates.
Computer vision model representations strongly predicted brain responses in ventral visual cortex and fronto-parietal regions to both conscious and unconscious perceptual contents, even in observers with null perceptual sensitivity. This pattern generalized across different participants. The findings suggest that the fronto-parietal cortex's role in conscious perception is unlikely to involve broadcasting information as proposed by global neuronal workspace theory, but may instead relate to generating meta-representations as proposed by higher-order theories.