# Core Question
Does consciousness require the brain to monitor or model its own inner workings?

# Description
These tests look at second-order processing—the mind reflecting on its own states, predictions, or control signals. It challenges theories to show whether awareness depends on higher-order representations, explicit self-monitoring, or active attention schema models.

# Explananda
## (Conscious) Error Self-Correction
### Description
The phenomenon in which a person recognizes that a consciously endorsed judgment, decision or action was incorrect and then revises or corrects it, sometimes before receiving direct external feedback. This can involve noticing an internal conflict between an intended result, the action taken and the outcome being experienced.

### Challenge
A strong theory of consciousness should explain the mechanism by which a conscious system evaluates its own current representations, identifies an error and changes its judgment or behaviour. It should clarify what role consciousness plays in the correction, how conscious error recognition differs from automatic or unconscious error processing, and why some errors enter awareness while others do not.

## Post-Decision Wagering
### Description
Instead of just asking a subject, “Did you see the flash of light?” (which can be prone to guessing), researchers ask them to bet money on whether their answer is correct. High wagers correlate heavily with conscious awareness, while low wagers indicate the subject is just guessing based on unconscious processing.

## Attentional Blink
### Description
If shown a rapid stream of letters on a screen and two target letters appear very close together (say, 300 milliseconds apart), your brain will often completely fail to consciously register the second target. Used to study the exact boundary line where a stimulus transitions from being processed unconsciously to entering conscious awareness.

## Cognitive Phenomenology
### Description
Explain whether higher-level cognitive states, such as “believing that 17 is a prime number,” possess a unique phenomenal “what-it-is-likeness” beyond sensory imagery Provides a mechanism for how a purely abstract thought either acquires a “felt” quality or explains why the feeling of “understanding” is merely an associated sensory tag

### Challenge
Tests the scope of the explanandum. It separates “Thin” views (phenomenology is limited to sensory feels) from “Thick” views (thoughts themselves have feels)

## Incentive Sensitization
### Description
A mirror image of pain asymbolia. Addiction states can involve a dissociation between the “wanting” behaviour and the “liking” positive valence, so that the person continues to perform that behaviour even though there is no positive reward and the experience may become negative.

### Challenge
Any theory needs to account for how the motivation drive can be separated from the reward experience. GWT could suggest that the valence is accessible to conscious experience but the source of motivation may not be shared within the workspace. IIT explains how sensations are integrated, and so it is less clear how it can explain why we sometimes behave in ways that are not rewarding and are contrary to our expressed desires.