PsyArXiv
November 17, 2025
Elise G Rowe, Ken Takeda, Masafumi Oizumi et al.
preprint
The effects of top-down attention on perception have been intensively studied using binary categorization tasks (e.g., seen vs. unseen). However, such tasks poorly characterise the quality of experience, or qualia, for short. To characterise attentional effects on qualia, we combined a dual-task attention paradigm with similarity rating tasks to examine whether relational structures of qualia...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
September 23, 2025
Kavindu H. Bandara, Elise G Rowe, Marta I. Garrido
2 citations
The role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in consciousness is hotly debated. Frontal theories argue that the PFC is necessary for consciousness, while sensory theories propose that consciousness arises from recurrent activity in the posterior cortex alone, with activity in the PFC resulting from the mere act of reporting. To resolve this dispute, we re-analysed an electroencephalography (EEG)...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Elise G Rowe, Ken Takeda, Masafumi Oizumi et al.
Top-down attentional amplification is often assumed to affect 'what' we see, that is, the contents of conscious experience. Previously, this claim has been examined by studies that manipulated attention and characterized conscious perception in binary categorical labels (e.g. seen versus unseen). However, these categorical judgments are not powerful enough to characterize the quality of...
Cortex
March 1, 2024
Elise G Rowe, Marta I. Garrido, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Current theories of consciousness can be categorized to some extent by their predictions about the putative role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conscious perception. One family of the theories proposes that the PFC is necessary for conscious perception. The other postulates that the PFC is not necessary and that other areas (e.g., posterior cortical areas) are more important for conscious...
Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience
2020
Elise G Rowe, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Marta I. Garrido
Detecting changes in the environment is fundamental for our survival. According to predictive coding theory, detecting these irregularities relies both on incoming sensory information and our top-down prior expectations (or internal generative models) about the world. Prediction errors (PEs), detectable in event-related potentials (ERPs), occur when there is a mismatch between the sensory input...