University of Sussex, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
93 papers in the library · 9,171 citations · publishing 1998-2026
August 26, 2018 Anil K. Seth preprint
At the birth of psychology as a science, consciousness was its central problem. But throughout the twentieth century, ideological and methodological concerns pushed the explicit empirical study of consciousness to the sidelines. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and impetus befitting its status as the central feature of our mental lives. Nowadays consciousness...
PsyArXiv August 26, 2018 Anil K. Seth preprint
A major challenge for the successful naturalization of consciousness lies in locating its biological function, or functions. Although common sense suggests that conscious experience has many important functional roles in our lives, experiments and theoretical arguments challenge these everyday intuitions. Many human behaviors can occur in the absence of consciousness, and the natural world...
arXiv Preprint Archive June 25, 2018 Pedro A. M. Mediano, Anil K. Seth, Adam B. Barrett preprint
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a prominent theory of consciousness that has at its centre measures that quantify the extent to which a system generates more information than the sum of its parts. While several candidate measures of integrated information (`$Φ$') now exist, little is known about how they compare, especially in terms of their behaviour on non-trivial network models. In...
Neuropsychologia March 2018 Nicolas Rothen, David J. Schwartzman, Daniel Bor et al.
Synesthesia is associated with additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. Synesthesia is also accompanied by more general sensory and cortical changes, including enhanced modality-specific cortical excitability. Extensive cognitive training has been shown to generate synesthesia-like phenomenology but whether these...
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry February 27, 2018 Geoff Davies, Charlotte L. Rae, Sarah N. Garfinkel et al. 23 citations
INTRODUCTION: Metacognition, or "thinking about thinking", is a higher-order thought process that allows for the evaluation of perceptual processes for accuracy. Metacognitive accuracy is associated with the grey matter volume (GMV) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area also impacted in schizophrenia. The present study set out to investigate whether deficits in metacognitive accuracy are...
Neuroimage February 15, 2018 Michał Bola, Adam B. Barrett, Andrea Pigorini et al.
Loss of consciousness can result from a wide range of causes, including natural sleep and pharmacologically induced anesthesia. Important insights might thus come from identifying neuronal mechanisms of loss and re-emergence of consciousness independent of a specific manipulation. Therefore, to seek neuronal signatures of loss of consciousness common to sleep and anesthesia we analyzed...
Brain and Neuroscience Advances 2018 Anil K. Seth
The mind and brain sciences began with consciousness as a central concern. But for much of the 20th century, ideological and methodological concerns relegated its empirical study to the margins. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and momentum befitting its status as the primary feature of our mental lives. Nowadays, consciousness science encompasses a rich...
Scientific Reports November 16, 2017 Keisuke Suzuki, Warrick Roseboom, David J. Schwartzman et al. 111 citations
Altered states of consciousness, such as psychotic or pharmacologically-induced hallucinations, provide a unique opportunity to examine the mechanisms underlying conscious perception. However, the phenomenological properties of these states are difficult to isolate experimentally from other, more general physiological and cognitive effects of psychoactive substances or psychopathological...
bioRxiv Preprint Server November 3, 2017 Keisuke Suzuki, Warrick Roseboom, David J. Schwartzman et al. 2 citations preprint
Altered states of consciousness, such as psychotic or pharmacologically-induced hallucinations, provide a unique opportunity to examine the mechanisms underlying conscious perception. However, the phenomenological properties of these states are difficult to isolate experimentally from other, more general physiological and cognitive effects of psychoactive substances or psychopathological...
Scientific Reports April 19, 2017 Michael Schartner, Robin Carhart-Harris, Adam B. Barrett et al. 450 citations
Abstract What is the level of consciousness of the psychedelic state? Empirically, measures of neural signal diversity such as entropy and Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity score higher for wakeful rest than for states with lower conscious level like propofol-induced anesthesia. Here we compute these measures for spontaneous magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals from humans during altered states of...
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...
Neuroscience of Consciousness January 27, 2017 Michael Schartner, Andrea Pigorini, Steve A. Gibbs et al. 158 citations
Key to understanding the neuronal basis of consciousness is the characterization of the neural signatures of changes in level of consciousness during sleep. Here we analysed three measures of dynamical complexity on spontaneous depth electrode recordings from 10 epilepsy patients during wakeful rest (WR) and different stages of sleep: (i) Lempel-Ziv complexity, which is derived from how...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences October 11, 2016 Anil K. Seth, Karl Friston 936 citations
We review a recent shift in conceptions of interoception and its relationship to hierarchical inference in the brain. The notion of interoceptive inference means that bodily states are regulated by autonomic reflexes that are enslaved by descending predictions from deep generative models of our internal and external milieu. This re-conceptualization illuminates several issues in cognitive and...
Journal of Neuroscience October 5, 2016 Maxine T. Sherman, Anil K. Seth, Ryota Kanai
It is clear that prior expectations shape perceptual decision-making, yet their contribution to the construction of subjective decision confidence remains largely unexplored. We recorded fMRI data while participants made perceptual decisions and confidence judgments, manipulating perceptual prior expectations while controlling for potential confounds of attention. Results show that subjective...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience April 15, 2016 Maxine T. Sherman, Ryota Kanai, Anil K. Seth et al. 134 citations
Prior expectations have a powerful influence on perception, biasing both decision and confidence. However, how this occurs at the neural level remains unclear. It has been suggested that spontaneous alpha-band neural oscillations represent rhythms of the perceptual system that periodically modulate perceptual judgments. We hypothesized that these oscillations instantiate the effects of...
Animal Sentience 2016 Anil K. Seth 49 citations
Do fish consciously feel pain? Addressing this question, Key (2016) asks whether the neural mechanisms underlying conscious pain reports in humans can be identified in fish. This strategy fails in three ways. First, non-mammalian consciousness — if it exists — may depend on different mechanisms. Second, accumulating neurophysiological and behavioural evidence, evolutionary considerations, and...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2016 Anil K. Seth 4 citations
Can consciousness be understood through an association with voluntary skeletomotor action selection? Although flexible and integrated action selection is a plausible function for consciousness, a narrow focus on skeletomotor control neglects the contributions to conscious selfhood and subjectivity that rest on interoception and autonomic regulation (internal "action"). I consider these issues...
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 April 7, 2015 Anil K. Seth 56 citations
Can perceptual presence be explained by counterfactually-rich predictive models linking perception and action? Considering an unusually rich range of responses to this idea has led me to (1) re-emphasize the core conceptual commitment of "predictive processing of sensorimotor contingencies" (PPSMC) to predictive model-based perception, (2) reconsider the relationship between presence and...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience July 3, 2014 Cassandra D. Gould van Praag, Tom Froese, Adam B. Barrett et al. 29 citations
Investigation of synesthesia phenomenology in adults is needed to constrain accounts of developmental trajectories of this trait. We report an extended phenomenological investigation of sequence-space synesthesia in a single case (AB). We used the Elicitation Interview (EI) method to facilitate repeated exploration of AB's synesthetic experience. During an EI the subject's attention is...
Frontiers in Psychology May 22, 2014 Daniel eBor, Anil K. Seth
Consciousness has of late become a hot topic in neuroscience. Empirical work has centred on identifying potential neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), with a converging view that the prefrontal parietal network (PPN) is closely associated with this process. Theoretical work has primarily sought to explain how informational properties of this cortical network could account for phenomenal...
Cognitive Neuroscience January 21, 2014 Anil K. Seth 357 citations
Normal perception involves experiencing objects within perceptual scenes as real, as existing in the world. This property of "perceptual presence" has motivated "sensorimotor theories" which understand perception to involve the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies. However, the mechanistic basis of sensorimotor contingencies and their mastery has remained unclear. Sensorimotor theory also...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences October 12, 2013 Anil K. Seth 1,812 citations
The concept of the brain as a prediction machine has enjoyed a resurgence in the context of the Bayesian brain and predictive coding approaches within cognitive science. To date, this perspective has been applied primarily to exteroceptive perception (e.g., vision, audition), and action. Here, I describe a predictive, inferential perspective on interoception: 'interoceptive inference' conceives...
Neuropsychologia August 28, 2013 Keisuke Suzuki, Sarah N. Garfinkel, Hugo Critchley et al. 491 citations
Identifying with a body is central to being a conscious self. The now classic "rubber hand illusion" demonstrates that the experience of body-ownership can be modulated by manipulating the timing of exteroceptive (visual and tactile) body-related feedback. Moreover, the strength of this modulation is related to individual differences in sensitivity to internal bodily signals (interoception)....
Frontiers in Psychology 2013 Melanie Boly, Anil K. Seth, Melanie Wilke et al. 295 citations
This joint article reflects the authors' personal views regarding noteworthy advances in the neuroscience of consciousness in the last 10 years, and suggests what we feel may be promising future directions. It is based on a small conference at the Samoset Resort in Rockport, Maine, USA, in July of 2012, organized by the Mind Science Foundation of San Antonio, Texas. Here, we summarize recent...