The prefrontal cortex's role in consciousness is contested: frontal theories claim it is necessary, while sensory theories argue consciousness arises from the posterior cortex alone, with prefrontal activity only reflecting reporting. Re-analyzing EEG data from 30 participants in a no-report inattentional blindness paradigm, source reconstruction and dynamic causal modeling estimated effective connectivity between prefrontal and posterior regions. A hypothesis-driven analysis found that both theories could explain the data, with a slight preference for frontal theories: a model disabling backward connections within the posterior cortex explained awareness better (53%) than one without backward connections from prefrontal to sensory regions. The findings suggest a subtle but crucial frontal contribution and call for revising current theories.
Top-down attention affects not just whether we see something, but how we see it—the quality of conscious experience, or qualia. Using a dual-task paradigm, participants rated similarity of stimulus pairs in the periphery for rotated letters, bisected disks, and greyscale faces. Similarity ratings served as a proxy for qualia structures, analyzed with dimension reduction and optimal transport alignment. Attention withdrawal collapsed qualia structures for letters and disks, but alignment accuracy remained high for face qualia structures under both full and poor attention. This relational judgment approach extends previous binary categorization methods and offers a novel way to study qualia structures.
The prefrontal cortex's role in consciousness is debated: frontal theories say it is necessary, while sensory theories argue consciousness arises from the posterior cortex alone. Re-analyzing EEG data from 30 participants in a no-report inattentional blindness paradigm, dynamic causal modeling estimated effective connectivity between prefrontal and posterior cortices. A data-driven search could not support either theory, but a hypothesis-driven analysis showed both could explain the data, with a slight preference for frontal theories. A model disabling backward connections within the posterior cortex explained awareness better (53%) than one without prefrontal-to-sensory backward connections. The findings suggest a subtle frontal contribution and call for revising current theories.
Current theories of consciousness disagree on whether the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is necessary for conscious perception. No-report paradigms, which separate task reporting from conscious experience, have shown reduced PFC activity but have not tested the PFC's role in monitoring sensory cortex patterns. Reanalyzing EEG data from a no-report inattentional blindness paradigm, researchers used Granger causality and multivariate classifiers to examine feedforward input from visual areas to the PFC. Unexpectedly, information about the sensory stimulus was present in these input patterns regardless of whether the stimulus was consciously seen. This suggests that theories of consciousness must be revised, as the contents of consciousness are decodable from posterior-to-PFC inputs even without awareness or report.