Neuron
June 17, 2026
Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, Jun Seo Hwang, Hakwan Lau et al.
Rising media attention regarding consciousness in animals, fetuses, organoids, and AI has led to some rather strong statements. Most of these claims are based on "markers" of consciousness that track the general capacity for information processing rather than subjective experience per se. Accordingly, their relevance for theory arbitration may actually be limited.
Acta Psychologica
February 13, 2026
Hina Kawaguchi, Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, Hakwan Lau et al.
Story reading is often accompanied with mental visualization of the described scenes and events. Recent findings indicate that individuals who report not experiencing any visual imagery (a condition called aphantasia), also report being less absorbed and engaged when reading stories. In the present study, we explored how aphantasics (n = 8) and controls (n = 20) read imagery-rich stories. We...
Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
June 17, 2024
Cody A Cushing, Ha-Kwan Lau, Stefan G Hofmann et al.
When patients seek professional help for mental disorders, they often do so because of troubling subjective affective experiences. While these subjective states are at the center of the patient's symptomatology, scientific tools for studying them and their cognitive antecedents are limited. Here, we explore the use of concepts and analytic tools from the science of consciousness, a field of...
Shawn Manuel, Jean Gagnon, Frédéric Gosselin et al.
preprint
The way that individuals subjectively experience the world greatly influences their own mental well-being. However, it remains a considerable challenge to precisely characterize the breadth and depth of such experiences. One persistent problem is the lack of objective tools for directly quantifying and comparing narrative reports of subjective experiences. Here, we develop a new approach to map...