Damasio's theory of consciousness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Developed in his (1999) book, The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio's three layered theory of consciousness is based on a hierarchy of stages, with each stage building upon the last. The most basic representation of the organism is referred to as the Protoself, next is Core Consciousness, and finally, Extended Consciousness. Damasio, who is an internationally recognized leader in neuroscience, was educated at the University of Lisbon and currently directs the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute. Damasio's approach to explaining the development of consciousness relies on three notions: emotion, feeling, and feeling a feeling. Emotions are a collection of unconscious neural responses to qualia. These complex reactions to stimuli cause observable external changes in the organism. A feeling arises when the organism becomes aware of the changes it is experiencing as a result of external or internal stimuli.

Protoself

Our most basic representation of self, as Damasio dubs it, is the Protoself. A non conscious state, this level of self is shared by many species. This is the most basic level of awareness signified by a collection of neural patterns that are representative of the body's internal state. The function of this 'self' is to constantly detect and record, moment by moment, the internal physical changes that affect the homeostasis of the organism. Protoself does not represent a traditional sense of self; rather, it is a pre-conscious state, which provides a reference for the core self and autobiographical self to build from. As Damasio puts it, "Protoself is a coherent collection of neural patterns, which map moment-by-moment the state of the physical structure of the organism" (Damasio 1999).

Multiple brain areas are required for the Protoself to function. Namely, the hypothalamus, which controls the general homeostasis of the organism, the brain stem, whose nuclei map body signals, and the insular cortex whose function is linked to emotion. These brain areas work together to keep up with the constant process of collecting neural patterns to map the current status of the body's responses to environmental changes. The Protoself does not require language in order to function; moreover, it is a direct report of one's experience.

In this state, emotion begins to manifest itself as second-order neural patterns located in subcortical areas of the brain. Emotion acts as a neural object, from which a physical reaction can be drawn. This reaction causes the organism to become aware of the changes that are affecting it. From this realization, springs Damasio's notion of “feeling”. This occurs when the patterns contributing to emotion manifest as mental images, or brain movies. When the body is modified by these neural objects, the second layer of self emerges. This is known as core consciousness.

Core consciousness

Sufficiently more evolved is the second layer of Damasio's theory, Core Consciousness. This emergent process occurs when an organism becomes consciously aware of feelings associated with changes occurring to its internal bodily state; it is able to recognize that its thoughts are its own, and that they are formulated in its own perspective. It develops a momentary sense of self, as the brain continuously builds representative images, based on communications received from the Protoself. This level of consciousness is not exclusive to human beings and remains consistent and stable throughout the lifetime of the organism The image is a result of mental patterns which are caused by an interaction with internal or external stimulus. A relationship is established, between the organism and the object it is observing as the brain continuously creates images to represent the organism's experience of qualia.

Damasio's definition of emotion is that of an unconscious reaction to any internal or external stimulus which activates neural patterns in the brain. ‘Feeling’ emerges as a still unconscious state which simply senses the changes affecting the Protoself due to the emotional state. These patterns develop into mental images, which then float into the organism's awareness. Put simply, consciousness is the feeling of knowing a feeling. When the organism becomes aware of the feeling that its bodily state (Protoself) is being affected by its experiences, or response to emotion, Core Consciousness is born. The brain continues to present nonverbal narrative sequence of images in the mind of the organism, based on its relationship to objects. An object in this context can be anything from a person, to a melody, to a neural image. Core consciousness is concerned only with the present moment, here and now. It does not require language or memory, nor can it reflect on past experiences or project itself into the future.

Extended consciousness

When consciousness moves beyond the here and now, Damasio's third and final layer emerges as Extended Consciousness. This level could not exist without its predecessors, and, unlike them, requires a vast use of conventional memory. Therefore, an injury to a person's memory center can cause damage to their extended consciousness, without hurting the other layers. The autobiographical self draws on memory of past experiences which involves use of higher thought. This autobiographical layer of self is developed gradually over time. Working memory is necessary for an extensive display of items to be recalled and referenced. Linguistic areas of the brain are activated to enhance the organism's experience, however, contrary to the language of thought hypothesis, language is not necessarily required.

Antonio Damasio

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Damasio 

Antonio Damasio
Damasio at the Fronteiras do Pensamento conference in 2013.
Born	25 February 1944 (age 76) Lisbon, Portugal
Nationality	U.S. and Portuguese
Alma mater	University of Lisbon
Spouse(s)	Hanna Damasio
Awards	Pessoa Prize (1992) Golden Brain Award (1995) Prince of Asturias Prize (2005) Honda Prize (2010) Grawemeyer Award in Psychology (2014) Paul D. MacLean Award (2019)
Scientific career
Fields	Cognitive Neuroscience
Institutions	University of Southern California, University of Iowa
Thesis	Perturbações neurológicas da linguagem e de outras funções simbólicas (1974)
Author abbrev. (botany)	1333
Councilor of State
Incumbent
Assumed office 24 April 2017
President	Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa
Preceded by	António Guterres

Antonio Damasio (Portuguese: António Damásio) is a Portuguese-American neuroscientist. He is currently the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, as well as Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute. He was previously the chair of neurology at the University of Iowa for 20 years. Damasio heads the Brain and Creativity Institute, and has authored several books: his most recent work, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010), explores the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Damasio's research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.

Life and work

Damasio studied medicine at the University of Lisbon Medical School, where he also did his neurological residency and completed his doctorate. For part of his studies, he researched behavioral neurology under the supervision of Norman Geschwind of the Aphasia Research Center in Boston.

Damasio's main field is neurobiology, especially the neural systems which underlie emotion, decision-making, memory, language and consciousness. Damasio might believe that emotions play a critical role in high-level cognition—an idea counter to dominant 20th-century views in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy.

Damasio in 2008.

Damasio formulated the somatic marker hypothesis, a theory about how emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously). Emotions provide the scaffolding for the construction of social cognition and are required for the self processes which undergird consciousness. "Damasio provides a contemporary scientific validation of the linkage between feelings and the body by highlighting the connection between mind and nerve cells ... this personalized embodiment of mind."

The somatic marker hypothesis has inspired many neuroscience experiments carried out in laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, and has had a major impact in contemporary science and philosophy. Damasio has been named by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the most highly cited researchers in the past decade. Current work on the biology of moral decisions, neuro-economics, social communication, and drug-addiction, has been strongly influenced by Damasio's hypothesis. An article published in the Archives of Scientific Psychology in 2014 named Damasio one of the 100 most eminent psychologist of the modern era. (Diener et al. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 2014, 2, 20–32). The June–July issue of Sciences Humaines included Damasio in its list of 50 key thinkers in the human sciences of the past two centuries.

Damasio also proposed that emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and are rooted in reward/punishment mechanisms. He recovered William James' perspective on feelings as a read-out of body states, but expanded it with an "as-if-body-loop" device which allows for the substrate of feelings to be simulated rather than actual (foreshadowing the simulation process later uncovered by mirror neurons). He demonstrated experimentally that the insular cortex is a critical platform for feelings, a finding that has been widely replicated, and he uncovered cortical and subcortical induction sites for human emotions, e.g. in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and amygdala. He also demonstrated that while the insular cortex plays a major role in feelings, it is not necessary for feelings to occur, suggesting that brain stem structures play a basic role in the feeling process.

He has continued to investigate the neural basis of feelings and demonstrated that although the insular cortex is a major substrate for this process it is not exclusive, suggesting that brain stem nuclei are critical platforms as well. He regards feelings as the necessary foundation of sentience.

In another development, Damasio proposed that the cortical architecture on which learning and recall depend involves multiple, hierarchically organized loops of axonal projections that converge on certain nodes out of which projections diverge to the points of origin of convergence (the convergence-divergence zones). This architecture is applicable to the understanding of memory processes and of aspects of consciousness related to the access of mental contents.

In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio laid the foundations of the "enchainment of precedences": "the nonconscious neural signaling of an individual organism begets the protoself which permits core self and core consciousness, which allow for an autobiographical self, which permits extended consciousness. At the end of the chain, extended consciousness permits conscience.

Damasio's research depended significantly on establishing the modern human lesion method, an enterprise made possible by Hanna Damasio's structural neuroimaging/neuroanatomy work complemented by experimental neuroanatomy (with Gary Van Hoesen and Josef Parvizi), experimental neuropsychology (with Antoine Bechara, Ralph Adolphs, and Dan Tranel) and functional neuroimaging (with Kaspar Meyer, Jonas Kaplan, and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang). The experimental neuroanatomy work with Van Hoesen and Bradley Hyman led to the discovery of the disconnection of the hippocampus caused by neurofibrillary tangles in the entorhinal cortex of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

As a clinician, he and his collaborators have studied and treated disorders of behaviour and cognition, and movement disorders.

Damasio's books deal with the relationship between emotions and their brain substrates. His 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, won the Science et Vie prize, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and is translated in over 30 languages. It is regarded as one of the most influential books of the past two decades. His second book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, was named as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the New York Times Book Review, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and has over 30 foreign editions. Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, was published in 2003. In it, Damasio suggested that the philosopher Baruch Spinoza's thinking foreshadowed discoveries in biology and neuroscience views on the mind-body problem and that Spinoza was a protobiologist. Damasio's latest book is Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. In it Damasio suggests that the self is the key to conscious minds and that feelings, from the kind he designates as primordial to the well-known feelings of emotion, are the basic elements in the construction of the protoself and core self. The book received the Corinne International Book Prize.

Damasio at Fronteiras do Pensamento (Frontiers of Thought) in 2013

Damasio is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He is the recipient of several prizes, amongst them the Grawemeyer Award, the Honda Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Science and Technology and the Beaumont Medal from the American Medical Association, as well as honorary degrees from, most recently, the Sorbonne (Université Paris Descartes), shared with his wife Hanna Damasio. He has also received doctorates from the Universities of Aachen, Copenhagen, Leiden, Barcelona, Coimbra, Leuven and numerous others.

In 2013, the Escola Secundária António Damásio was dedicated in Lisbon.

He says he writes in the belief that "scientific knowledge can be a pillar to help humans endure and prevail."

He is married to Hanna Damasio, a prominent neuroscientist and frequent collaborator and co-author, who is a professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California and the director of the Dornsife Neuroimaging Center.

In 2017 he was designated member of the Council of State of Portugal, replacing Antonio Guterres, the 9th Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Damasio additionally serves on the board of directors of the Berggruen Institute, and sits on the jury for the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy.

Selected bibliography

Books

• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Putnam, 1994; revised Penguin edition, 2005
• The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt, 1999
• Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, 2003
• Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Pantheon, 2010. ISBN 978-1-5012-4695-1
• The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, Pantheon, 2018.

Selected articles

Fox G.R.; Kaplan J.; Damasio H.; Damasio A. (2015). "Neural correlates of gratitude". Frontiers in Psychology. 6 (1491): 1491. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01491. PMC 4588123. PMID 26483740.

Sachs M.; Damasio A.; Habibi A. (2015). "The pleasures of sad music: a systematic review". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 9 (404): 1–12. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00404. PMC 4513245. PMID 26257625.

Man K.; Damasio A.; Meyer K.; Kaplan J.T. (2015). "Convergent and invariant object representations for sight, sound, and touch". Human Brain Mapping. 36 (9): 3629–3640. doi:10.1002/hbm.22867. PMC 6869094. PMID 26047030.

Habibi A.; Damasio A. (2014). "Music, feelings and the human brain". Psychomusicology: Music, Mind and Brain. 24 (1): 92–102. doi:10.1037/pmu0000033.

Man K, Kaplan J.T., Damasio H, Damasio A. (28 October 2013). "Neural convergence and divergence in the mammalian cerebral cortex: from experimental neuroanatomy to functional neuroimaging". Journal of Comparative Neurology. 521 (18): 4097–4111. doi:10.1002/cne.23408. PMC 3853095. PMID 23840023.

Araujo H P, Kaplan JT, Damasio A (4 September 2013). "Cortical midline structures and autobiographical-self processes: an activation-likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7: 548. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00548. PMC 3762365. PMID 24027520.

Damasio, A; Carvalho, GB (2013). "The nature of feelings: Evolutionary and neurobiological origins". Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. 14 (2): 143–52. doi:10.1038/nrn3403. PMID 23329161. S2CID 35232202.

Damasio A, Damasio H, Tranel D (2012). "Persistence of feelings and sentience after bilateral damage of the insula". Cerebral Cortex. 23 (4): 833–46. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhs077. PMC 3657385. PMID 22473895.

Feinstein J, Adolphs R, Damasio A, Tranel D (2011). "The human amygdala and the induction and experience of fear". Current Biology. 21 (1): 1–5. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.042. PMC 3030206. PMID 21167712.

Meyer K, Kaplan JT, Essex R, Damasio H, Damasio A (2011). "Seeing touch is correlated with content-specific activity in primary somatosensory cortex". Cerebral Cortex. 21 (9): 2113–2121. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhq289. PMC 3155604. PMID 21330469.

Meyer K, Kaplan JT, Essex R, Webber C, Damasio H, Damasio A (2010). "Predicting visual stimuli based on activity in auditory cortices". Nature Neuroscience. 13 (6): 667–668. doi:10.1038/nn.2533. PMID 20436482. S2CID 8226089.

Meyer K, Damasio A (2009). "Convergence and divergence in a neural architecture for recognition and memory". Trends in Neurosciences. 32 (7): 376–382. doi:10.1016/j.tins.2009.04.002. PMID 19520438. S2CID 205403597.

Immordino-Yang MH, McColl A, Damasio H, Damasio A (2009). "Neural correlates of admiration and compassion". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 106 (19): 8021–8026. doi:10.1073/pnas.0810363106. PMC 2670880. PMID 19414310.

Damasio A, Meyer K (2008). "Behind the looking glass". Nature. 454 (7201): 167–168. Bibcode:2008Natur.454..167D. doi:10.1038/454167a. PMID 18615070. S2CID 200767224.

Parvizi J, Van Hoesen G, Buckwalter J, Damasio A (2006). "Neural connections of the posteromedial cortex in the macaque: Implications for the understanding of the neural basis of consciousness". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 103 (5): 1563–1568. doi:10.1073/pnas.0507729103. PMC 1345704. PMID 16432221.

Shiv B, Lowenstein G, Bechara A, Damasio H, Damasio A (2005). "Investment behavior and the negative side of emotion". Psychological Science. 16 (6): 435–439. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2005.01553.x (inactive 2020-09-01). PMID 15943668.

Parvizi J, Damasio AR (2003). "Neuroanatomical correlates of brainstem coma". Brain. 126 (Pt 7): 1524–1536. doi:10.1093/brain/awg166. PMID 12805123.

Parvizi J, Damasio AR (2001). "Consciousness and the brainstem". Cognition. 79 (1–2): 135–160. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(00)00127-X. PMID 11164026. S2CID 205872101.

Damasio AR, Grabowski TJ, Bechara A, Damasio H, Ponto LL, Parvizi J, Hichwa RD (2000). "Subcortical and cortical brain activity during the feeling of self-generated emotions". Nature Neuroscience. 3 (10): 1049–1056. doi:10.1038/79871. PMID 11017179. S2CID 3352415.

Damasio AR. (1999). "How the brain creates the mind". Scientific American. 281 (6): 74–79. Bibcode:1999SciAm.281f.112D. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1299-112. PMID 10614073.

Damasio AR (1998). "Investigating the biology of consciousness". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. 353 (1377): 1879–1882. doi:10.1098/rstb.1998.0339. PMC 1692416. PMID 9854259.

Bechara A, Damasio H, Tranel D, Damasio AR (1997). "Deciding advantageously before knowing the advantageous strategy". Science. 275 (5304): 1293–1294. doi:10.1126/science.275.5304.1293. PMID 9036851. S2CID 4942279.

Damasio AR. (1996). "The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. 351 (1346): 1413–1420. doi:10.1098/rstb.1996.0125. PMID 8941953.

Bechara A, Damasio AR, Damasio H, Anderson S (1994). "Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex". Cognition. 50 (1–3): 7–15. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(94)90018-3. PMID 8039375. S2CID 204981454.

Adolphs R, Tranel D, Damasio AR (1994). "Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala". Nature. 372 (6507): 669–672. Bibcode:1994Natur.372..669A. doi:10.1038/372669a0. PMID 7990957. S2CID 25169376.

Damasio AR, Tranel D (1993). "Nouns and verbs are retrieved with differently distributed neural systems". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 90 (11): 4957–4960. Bibcode:1993PNAS...90.4957D. doi:10.1073/pnas.90.11.4957. PMC 46632. PMID 8506341.

Damasio A, Tranel D, Damasio H (1990). "Face agnosia and the neural substrates of memory". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 13: 89–109. doi:10.1146/annurev.ne.13.030190.000513. PMID 2183687.

Damasio AR. (1989). "Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition". Cognition. 33 (1–2): 25–62. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.308.6140. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(89)90005-X. PMID 2691184. S2CID 34115898.

Tranel D, Damasio A (1985). "Knowledge without awareness: An autonomic index of facial recognition by prosopagnosics". Science. 228 (21): 1453–1454. Bibcode:1985Sci...228.1453T. doi:10.1126/science.4012303. PMID 4012303.

Hyman B, Van Hoesen GW, Damasio A, Barnes C (1984). "Alzheimer's disease: Cell-specific pathology isolates the hippocampal formation". Science. 225 (4667): 1168–1170. Bibcode:1984Sci...225.1168H. doi:10.1126/science.6474172. PMID 6474172.

Damasio A, Geschwind N (1984). "The neural basis of language". Annual Review of Neuroscience. 7: 127–147. doi:10.1146/annurev.ne.07.030184.001015. PMID 6370077.

Anderson SW, Bechara A, Damasio H, Tranel D, Damasio AR (1999). "Impairment of social and moral behaviour related to early damage in human prefrontal cortex". Nature Neuroscience. 2 (11): 1032–1037. doi:10.1038/14833. PMID 10526345. S2CID 204990285.

 

Technology assessment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_assessment 

Technology assessment (TA, German: Technikfolgenabschätzung, French: évaluation des choix scientifiques et technologiques) is a scientific, interactive, and communicative process that aims to contribute to the formation of public and political opinion on societal aspects of science and technology. This is a means of assessing and rating the new technology from the time when it was first developed to the time when it is potentially accepted by the public and authorities for further use. In essence, TA could be defined as "as a form of policy research that examines short- and long term consequences (for example, societal, economic, ethical, legal) of the application of technology."

General description

Assessment of ICT

TA is the study and evaluation of new technologies. It is a way of trying to forecast and prepare for the upcoming technological advancements and their repercussions to the society, and then make decisions based on the judgments. It is based on the conviction that new developments within, and discoveries by, the scientific community are relevant for the world at large rather than just for the scientific experts themselves, and that technological progress can never be free of ethical implications. Technology assessment was initially practiced in the 1960s in the United States where it would focus on analyzing the significance of "supersonic transportation, pollution of the environment and ethics of genetic screening."

Also, technology assessment recognizes the fact that scientists normally are not trained ethicists themselves and accordingly ought to be very careful when passing ethical judgement on their own, or their colleagues, new findings, projects, or work in progress. TA is a very broad phenomenon which also includes aspects such as "diffusion of technology (and technology transfer), factors leading to rapid acceptance of new technology, and the role of technology and society."

Technology assessment assumes a global perspective and is future-oriented, not anti-technological. TA considers its task as an interdisciplinary approach to solving already existing problems and preventing potential damage caused by the uncritical application and the commercialization of new technologies.

Therefore, any results of technology assessment studies must be published, and particular consideration must be given to communication with political decision-makers.

An important problem concerning technology assessment is the so-called Collingridge dilemma: on the one hand, impacts of new technologies cannot be easily predicted until the technology is extensively developed and widely used; on the other hand, control or change of a technology is difficult as soon as it is widely used. It emphasizes on the fact that technologies, in their early stage, are unpredictable with regards to their implications and rather tough to regulate or control once it has been widely accepted by the society. Shaping or directing this technology is the desired direction becomes difficult for the authorities at this period of time. There have been several approaches put in place in order to tackle this dilemma, one of the common ones being "anticipation." In this approach, authorities and assessors "anticipate ethical impacts of a technology ("technomoral scenarios"), being too speculative to be reliable, or on ethically regulating technological developments ("sociotechnical experiments"), discarding anticipation of the future implications."

Comparing costs and benefit of each decision

 

OTA

Technology assessments, which are a form of cost–benefit analysis, are a medium for decision makers to evaluate and analyze solutions with regards to the particular technology assessment, and choose a best possible option which is cost effective and obeys the authoritative and budgetary requirements. However, they are difficult if not impossible to carry out in an objective manner since subjective decisions and value judgments have to be made regarding a number of complex issues such as (a) the boundaries of the analysis (i.e., what costs are internalized and externalized), (b) the selection of appropriate indicators of potential positive and negative consequences of the new technology, (c) the monetization of non-market values, and (d) a wide range of ethical perspectives. Consequently, most technology assessments are neither objective nor value-neutral exercises but instead are greatly influenced and biased by the values of the most powerful stakeholders, which are in many cases the developers and proponents (i.e., corporations and governments) of new technologies under consideration. In the most extreme view, as expressed by Ian Barbour in '’Technology, Environment, and Human Values'’, technology assessment is "a one-sided apology for contemporary technology by people with a stake in its continuation."

Overall, technology assessment is a very broad field which reaches beyond just technology and industrial phenomenons. It handles the assessment of effects, consequences, and risks of a technology, but also is a forecasting function looking into the projection of opportunities and skill development as an input into strategic planning." Some of the major fields of TA are: information technology, hydrogen technologies, nuclear technology, molecular nanotechnology, pharmacology, organ transplants, gene technology, artificial intelligence, the Internet and many more. Health technology assessment is related, but profoundly different, despite the similarity in the name.

Forms and concepts of technology assessment

The following types of concepts of TA are those that are most visible and practiced. There are, however, a number of further TA forms that are only proposed as concepts in the literature or are the label used by a particular TA institution.

EPTA

• Parliamentary TA (PTA): TA activities of various kinds whose addressee is a parliament. PTA may be performed directly by members of those parliaments (e.g. in France and Finland) or on their behalf of related TA institutions (such as in the UK, in Germany and Denmark) or by organisations not directly linked to a Parliament (such as in the Netherlands and Switzerland).
  
• Expert TA (often also referred to as the classical TA or traditional TA concept): TA activities carried out by (a team of) TA and technical experts. Input from stakeholders and other actors is included only via written statements, documents and interviews, but not as in participatory TA.
• Participatory TA (pTA): TA activities which actively, systematically and methodologically involve various kinds of social actors as assessors and discussants, such as different kinds of civil society organisations, representatives of the state systems, but characteristically also individual stakeholders and citizens (lay persons), technical scientists and technical experts. Standard pTA methods include consensus conferences, focus groups, scenario workshops etc. Sometimes pTA is further divided into expert-stakeholder pTA and public pTA (including lay persons). The participatory assessment makes room for the inclusion of laypeople and establishes the value of varied point of views, interests and knowledge. It shows importance of the need for decision makers and actors to have a varied set of mindsets and perspective to make a combined, informed and rational decision.
• Constructive TA (CTA): This concept of TA, developed in the Netherlands, but also applied and discussed elsewhere attempts to broaden the design of new technology through feedback of TA activities into the actual construction of technology. Contrary to other forms of TA, CTA is not directed toward influencing regulatory practices by assessing the impacts of technology. Instead, CTA wants to address social issues around technology by influencing design practices. It aims to "mobilize insights on co-evolutionary dynamics of science, technology and society for anticipating and assessing technologies, rather than being predominantly concerned with assessing societal impacts of a quasi-given technology." This assessment established the value of involving users in the development and innovation process, encouraging the development and adaptation of new technology in their daily life.
• Discursive TA or Argumentative TA: This type of TA wants to deepen the political and normative debate about science, technology and society. It is inspired by ethics, policy discourse analysis and the sociology of expectations in science and technology. This mode of TA aims to clarify and bring under public and political scrutiny the normative assumptions and visions that drive the actors who are socially shaping science and technology. This assessment can be used as a tool to analyse and evaluate the background of each and every reaction or perception that takes place for each technology; often some of the reactions these assessors receive are not related to science or technology. Some of the ways of analyzing actors and their reaction is by "studying prospective users' everyday-life practices in their own right, and in naturalistic settings." Accordingly, argumentative TA not only addresses the side effects of technological change, but deals with both broader impacts of science and technology and the fundamental normative question of why developing a certain technology is legitimate and desirable.
  
  
  

• HTA conference and workshop
• Health TA (HTA): A specialised type of expert TA informing policy makers about efficacy, safety and cost effectiveness issues of pharmaceuticals and medical treatments, see health technology assessment.

Technology assessment institutions around the world

Many TA institutions are members of the European Parliamentary Technology Assessment (EPTA) network, some are working for the STOA panel of the European Parliament and formed the European Technology Assessment Group (ETAG).

• Centre for Technology Assessment (TA-SWISS), Bern, Switzerland.
• Institute of Technology Assessment (ITA) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
• Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• (former) Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)
• The Danish Board of Technology Foundation, Copenhagen
• Norwegian Board of Technology, Oslo
• Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST), London
• Rathenau Institute, The Hague
• Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) panel of the European Parliament, Brussels
• Science and Technology Policy Research (SPRU), Sussex
• Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies, University of Twente
• Technology centre CAS (TC CAS), Prague, Czech Republic