Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
March 1, 2025
Liad Mudrik, Melanie Boly, Stanislas Dehaene et al.
68 citations
As the field of consciousness science matures, the research agenda has expanded from an initial focus on the neural correlates of consciousness, to developing and testing theories of consciousness. Several theories have been put forward, each aiming to elucidate the relationship between consciousness and brain function. However, there is an ongoing, intense debate regarding whether these...
Journal of Consciousness Studies
March 31, 2022
Jonathan Birch, D. Broom, Heather Browning et al.
A conscious being has a subjective point of view on the world and on its own body. This idea of a ‘point of view’ is easiest to grasp in the case of vision. Ernst Mach, in the Analysis of Sensations, famously attempted to draw his own visual point of view (Figure 1). But there is far more to human subjective experience than vision. Our subjective point of view includes sounds, odours, tastes,...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
August 9, 2020
Georg Northoff, Victor A. F. Lamme
Various theories for the neural basis of consciousness have been proposed, suggesting a diversity of neural signs and mechanisms. We ask to what extent this diversity is real, or whether many theories share the same basic ideas with a potential for convergence towards a more unified theory of the neural basis of consciousness. For that purpose, we review and compare the various neural signs,...
Neuropsychology Review
May 12, 2020
Edward H.F. de Haan, Paul M. Corballis, Steven A. Hillyard et al.
86 citations
Recently, the discussion regarding the consequences of cutting the corpus callosum ("split-brain") has regained momentum (Corballis, Corballis, Berlucchi, & Marzi, Brain, 141(6), e46, 2018; Pinto et al., Brain, 140(5), 1231-1237, 2017a; Pinto, Lamme, & de Haan, Brain, 140(11), e68, 2017; Volz & Gazzaniga, Brain, 140(7), 2051-2060, 2017; Volz, Hillyard, Miller, & Gazzaniga, Brain, 141(3), e15,...
Frontiers in Psychology
2020
Victor A. F. Lamme
Visual functions are reviewed that coincide with conscious as opposed to unconscious vision. Four stages of vision are identified, going from the fully invisible, to subjectively invisible, unattended, and clearly visible. It is proposed that feature extraction, categorization, and some aspects of visual inference occur during full and subjective invisibility. Functions related to perceptual...
Nature Human Behaviour
February 1, 2019
M. Michel, Diane M Beck, Ned Block et al.
Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Victor A. F. Lamme
Significant progress has been made in the study of consciousness. Promising theories have been developed and a wealth of experimental data has been generated, both guiding us towards a better understanding of this complex phenomenon. However, new challenges have surfaced. Is visual consciousness about the seeing or the knowing that you see? Controversy about whether the conscious experience is...
Science
January 25, 2018
Olivia Carter, Jakob Hohwy, Jeroen J A Van Boxtel et al.
86 citations
In their Review “What is consciousness, and could machines have it?” (27 October 2017, p. [486][1]), S. Dehaene et al. argue that the science of consciousness indicates that we are not on the verge of creating conscious machines. However, Dehaene et al. ask and answer the wrong questions. To
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
January 30, 2017
Yair Pinto, Annelinde R. E. Vandenbroucke, Marte Otten et al.
23 citations
Is conscious visual perception limited to the locations that a person attends? The remarkable phenomenon of change blindness, which shows that people miss nearly all unattended changes in a visual scene, suggests the answer is yes. However, change blindness is found after visual interference (a mask or a new scene), so that subjects have to rely on working memory (WM), which has limited...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
November 13, 2015
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Melanie Wilke, Stefan Frässle et al.
567 citations
The goal of consciousness research is to reveal the neural basis of phenomenal experience. To study phenomenology, experimenters seem obliged to ask reports from the subjects to ascertain what they experience. However, we argue that the requirement of reports has biased the search for the neural correlates of consciousness over the past decades. More recent studies attempt to dissociate neural...
Journal of Vision
June 26, 2015
Yair Pinto, Simon van Gaal, Floris P De Lange et al.
177 citations
How do expectations influence transitions between unconscious and conscious perceptual processing? According to the influential predictive processing framework, perceptual content is determined by predictive models of the causes of sensory signals. On one interpretation, conscious contents arise when predictive models are verified by matching sensory input (minimizing prediction error). On...
Cognitive Neuroscience
September 1, 2010
Victor A. F. Lamme
Is there consciousness in machines? Or in animals? What happens to consciousness when we are asleep, or in vegetative state? These are just a few examples of the many questions about consciousness that are troubling scientists and laypersons alike. Moreover, these questions share a striking feature: They seem to have been around forever, yet neither science nor philosophy has been able to...