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....
A lesion of striate cortex, area V1, produces blindness in the retinotopically corresponding part of the visual field, although in some cases visual abilities in the blind field remain that are paradoxically devoid of conscious visual percepts ("blindsight"). Here we demonstrate that the blindsight subject GY can experience visual sensations of phosphenes in his blind field induced by...
The lack of an accepted measure of awareness has made claims that accurate decisions can be made without awareness controversial. Here we introduce a new objective measure of awareness, post-decision wagering. We show that participants fail to maximize cash earnings by wagering high following correct decisions in blindsight, the Iowa gambling task and an artificial grammar task. This...