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...
PNAS Nexus
January 23, 2023
Cody A Cushing, Alexei J Dawes, Stefan G Hofmann et al.
The mechanisms underlying the subjective experiences of mental disorders remain poorly understood. This is partly due to long-standing over-emphasis on behavioral and physiological symptoms and a de-emphasis of the patient's subjective experiences when searching for treatments. Here, we provide a new perspective on the subjective experience of mental disorders based on findings in neuroscience...
Animal Sentience
2017
Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, Piercesare Grimaldi, Hakwan Lau
3 citations
We disagree with Woodruff that we have good neurobiological reasons to think fishes are sentient, because mechanisms for consciousness are controversial even in humans. To the extent that there are consensuses in that literature, they do not support Woodruff's claims.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2017
Jorge Morales, Yasha Mouradi, Claire Sergent et al.
A recent fMRI study by Webb et al. (Cortical networks involved in visual awareness independent of visual attention, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2016;113:13923-28) proposes a new method for finding the neural correlates of awareness by matching attention across awareness conditions. The experimental design, however, seems at odds with known features of attention. We highlight logical and...
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...