Neural Architectures of Double Consciousness: Modeling the Racialized Self through the Attention Schema Theory of Cognition

Abstract

Double consciousness, as articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois, encapsulates the lived experience of African Americans navigating self-perception through both an intrinsic awareness of the self and the external gaze of a society shaped by racial ontologies. This duality is not just a psychological phenomenon, but a product of historical and structural forces—the lasting ramifications of slavery and systemic oppression. Slavery established a framework of domination that not only depersonalized Black bodies but embedded notions of Black inferiority into the very fabric of American society. This legacy created an epistemic burden, an ongoing cognitive adaptation, where Black individuals are forced to see themselves ‘through the revelation of the other world’—through the distorted eyes of a society that devalues them. This partition between the true self and the imposed identity creates a dissonance, a ‘twoness,’ that fractures the Black psyche, shaping how Black individuals navigate and understand the world, as well as their relationship to it. Thus, Africana philosophy sees double consciousness not only as a psychological condition but as an existential struggle against identity constructs imposed by society—tensions that reverberate through the enduring legacies of coloniality and slavery. This thesis explores the neural mechanisms underlying double consciousness through the lens of Michael Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory (AST), proposing that racialized self-awareness modulates attentional control, introspection, and cognitive performance. Using a modified Posner cueing paradigm, the study investigates how sociohistorical architectures of race shape attentional processing, reaction time, and self-reflection in Black Princeton students. The results reveal that negative racial priming—exposure to imagery of racialized social contexts—significantly impairs cognitive performance, with marked differences between negative priming and both neutral and positive priming conditions. External racial stimuli serve as primes, triggering shifts in the participant’s internal state, activating self-representations tied to Black identity and collective memories of historical oppression, which then influence cognitive performance. These findings suggest that racialized stimuli lead to the differential allocation of cognitive resources, particularly activating self-referential processing networks, such as the mPFC and TPJ, more intensely than other types of stimuli. While positive primes, associated with socially validated institutional affiliations, did influence performance, the effect was not statistically significant. These results support the hypothesis that attentional shifts, driven by race-related imagery, are intricately tied to self-representation and regulation, highlighting how double consciousness engages neural processes governing attention and self-perception. Furthermore, the research explores how deep Q-learning models can simulate these attentional shifts, integrating a neural network framework that incorporates identity-related stimuli. This study provides empirical evidence linking social identity with attentional mechanisms, contributing to neuroscience, social psychology, and the philosophy of race. It establishes the view that double consciousness is not merely a sociocultural concept but a neurocognitive reality, with profound implications for how Black individuals perceive themselves, the world, and their interactions within it—shaping their perception, cognition, self-concept, and behavior.