Article
Neurosciences
Torge Dellert, Miriam Mueller-Bardorff, Insa Schlossmacher, Michael Pitts, David Hofmann, Maximilian Bruchmann, Thomas Straube
Summary: Conscious visual perception is associated with early processing in stimulus-specific sensory brain areas and occipitotemporal processes, while task-related processes lead to widespread brain activations, including late frontoparietal activity.
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Michael A. Cohen, Jonathan Keefe, Timothy F. Brady
Summary: In this study, the researchers investigated different paradigms of visual awareness to determine whether conscious awareness occurs in a discrete or gradual manner. They found that a continuous signal detection model could account for the data from all the paradigms, surpassing the models supporting a discrete view of consciousness. These findings suggest that conscious awareness operates along a graded continuum.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Sucharit Katyal, Philippe Goldin
Summary: The study found that long-term meditators spent significantly longer in a mixed perceptual state following concentrative meditation practice, and this was strongly correlated with reduced parietal-occipital gamma-band phase synchrony. This suggests that concentrative meditation enables a non-evaluative perceptual stance supported by reduced communication between hierarchical visual brain regions.
ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
Michael A. Cohen, Caroline Ostrand, Nicole Frontero, Phuong-Nghi Pham
Summary: Traditionally, researchers infer the nature of perceptual experience by examining objects not fully encoded within a scene. However, studies have shown that observers often fail to notice drastic changes to a scene, even when their attention is focused on it.
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-GENERAL
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Sharif Kronemer, Mark Aksen, Julia Z. Ding, Jun Hwan Ryu, Qilong Xin, Zhaoxiong Ding, Jacob S. Prince, Hunki Kwon, Aya Khalaf, Sarit Forman, David S. Jin, Kevin Wang, Kaylie Chen, Claire Hu, Akshar Agarwal, Erik Saberski, Syed Mohammad Adil Wafa, Owen P. Morgan, Jia Wu, Kate L. Christison-Lagay, Nicholas Hasulak, Martha Morrell, Alexandra Urban, R. Todd Constable, Michael Pitts, R. Mark Richardson, Michael J. Crowley, Hal Blumenfeld
Summary: This study identified large-scale cortical-subcortical networks associated with conscious visual perception. The results demonstrate that the neurophysiology of consciousness is complex, involving multiple cortical and subcortical networks overlapping in space and time.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
(2022)
Review
Psychology
Ken Nakayama, Jeff Moher, Joo-Hyun Song
Summary: Action plays a crucial role in determining survival, but has not been fully integrated into psychology. The field of action or motor behavior is separate from traditional psychology due to the need for specialization. However, recent interest in action has uncovered unexpected findings that challenge traditional theories, revealing a closer relationship between vision and action.
ANNUAL REVIEW OF PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Jonathan Huntley, Daniel Bor, Feng Deng, Marco Mancuso, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Lorina Naci, Adrian M. M. Owen, Lorenzo Rocchi, Avital Sternin, Robert Howard
Summary: This article demonstrates the feasibility of using objective biomarkers such as TMS, EEG, ERPs, and fMRI to assess awareness in people with severe AD. The results suggest reduced capacity for consciousness in these individuals and potential differences in conscious awareness compared to healthy controls.
FRONTIERS IN HUMAN NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Michael S. A. Graziano
Summary: This article argues that consciousness has a logically sound, explanatory framework, different from typical accounts, and discusses the evolution of consciousness. By emphasizing the specific role of consciousness in cognition and behavior, it provides a proposed account of how consciousness may have evolved over millions of years. The goal is to present a comprehensive, overarching framework in which we can scientifically understand what consciousness is and what key adaptive roles it plays in brain function.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Lau M. Andersen, Mikkel C. Vinding, Kristian Sandberg, Morten Overgaard
Summary: The study found that tasks affect the neural correlates of consciousness. In the visual modality, occipital activity is most consistently correlated with perceptual awareness, whereas frontal activity may be closely related to cognitive aspects related to reports. The perceptual task recruited more occipital resources compared to the conceptual task.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Experimental
M. R. Dias da Silva, O. F. Goncalves, D. Branco, M. Postma
Summary: Fluctuation between external conscious processing and mind wandering is inherent to the human condition. Past research has shown that in tasks requiring sustained attention, internal-directed mind wandering constrains conscious processing of external stimuli, while conscious processing of internal stimuli is enhanced during mind wandering. This study used a visuomotor tracking task to investigate these effects and found that mind wandering is characterized by distinct neural signatures at both a state and trait level.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND COGNITION
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Mika Koivisto, Kalle Leino, Aino Pekkarinen, Jaakko Karttunen, Henry Railo, Mikko Hurme
Summary: Studies have shown that TMS-induced blindsight for orientation discrimination varies depending on the awareness measurement scale used, with no evidence of blindsight when participants report complete lack of awareness of the stimulus. Additionally, individual sensitivity to consciously discriminate orientation predicted behavior on supposedly unconscious trials, suggesting that blindsight-like discrimination in neurologically healthy individuals occurs only when there is some level of consciousness of the stimulus.
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Ulrich Ansorge, Matthew Pelowski, Cliodhna Quigley, Markus F. Peschl, Helmut Leder
Summary: Understanding consciousness is a challenging task in the natural sciences. Empirical aesthetics of art, specifically the study of art experiences, holds strong potential for advancing this field of research. Art can provide a more comprehensive description of conscious perception, leading to novel designs for studying consciousness in natural science research.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Hunki Kwon, Sharif Kronemer, Kate L. Christison-Lagay, Aya Khalaf, Jiajia Li, Julia Z. Ding, Noah C. Freedman, Hal Blumenfeld
Summary: The study revealed changes in gamma power in multiple brain regions during the earliest stages of conscious visual perception, involving visual processing, language memory, and attention control, among others.
Article
Linguistics
Adrienne Prettyman
Summary: This article defends the theory of diffuse attention and highlights its differences from focal attention based on evidence from psychology and neuroscience. It argues that diffuse attention is selective and can be object-based, enabling individuals to guide their behavior by selecting an object in a different way than focusing does.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Jan Drewes, Christoph Witzel, Weina Zhu
Summary: Continuous flash suppression (CFS) is widely used in studying unconscious visual processing, but little is known about the interactions between masks and stimuli. This study used b-CFS with feature-reduced targets and masks to investigate the effects of feature-similarity or -orthogonality. The findings suggest that stimuli with greater similarity to the masks are suppressed for longer, but this can be overcome by feature orthogonality in another dimension. This study reveals the existence of mask-target interactions in CFS and highlights the role of feature similarity and orthogonality.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)