Visual experience can sometimes depart from visual performance, providing a powerful lens into the mechanisms generating conscious perception. In one proposed dissociation—subjective inflation—unattended locations in the periphery appear stronger than attended ones despite equated performance. Subjective inflation has played a central role in motivating theories of consciousness that reject the...
Rounis, Maniscalco, Rothwell, Passingham, and Lau (2010) reported that stimulation of prefrontal cortex impairs visual metacognition. Bor, Schwartzman, Barrett, and Seth (2017) attempted to replicate this result, but adopted an experimental design that reduced their chanceof obtaining positive findings. Despite that, their results appeared initially consistent with those of Rounis et al., but...
What is the relationship between perceptual information processing and subjective perceptual experience? Empirical dissociations between stimulus identification performance and subjective reports of stimulus visibility are crucial for shedding light on this question. We replicated a finding that metacontrast masking can produce such a dissociation (Lau and Passingham, 2006), and report a novel...
Many imaging studies report activity in the prefrontal and parietal cortices when subjects are aware as opposed to unaware of visual stimuli. One possibility is that this activity simply reflects higher signal strength or the superior task performance that is associated with awareness. To find out, we studied the hemianope GY who has unilateral destruction of almost all primary visual cortices....
Introduction Current theories suggest that prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in visual awareness (Dehaene 2003). This hypothesis has been supported by a number of brain imaging studies (Rees 2002). However, critics have challenged that there has been a lack of neuropsychological demonstration of the essential role of PFC in visual awareness: PFC damage does not seem to result in...