In a recent opinion piece, Abid (2019) criticizes the hypothesis that subjective inflation may partly account for apparent phenomenological richness across the visual field and outside the focus of attention. In response, we address three main issues. First, we maintain that inflation should be interpreted as an intraperceptual-and not post-perceptual-phenomenon. Second, we describe how...
Previous studies have shown that spontaneous fluctuations in prestimulus fMRI activity can predict trial-by-trial fluctuations in the perception of identical stimuli (Boly et al., 2007; Hesselmann et al., 2008, 2010; Sadaghiani et al., 2009; Rahnev et al., 2012; Pajani et al., 2015), yet such activity on its own does not seem to lead to conscious perception, even when awareness is carefully...
How do we explain the seemingly rich nature of visual phenomenology while accounting for impoverished perception in the periphery? This apparent mismatch has led some to posit that rich phenomenological content overflows cognitive access, whereas others hold that phenomenology is in fact sparse and constrained by cognitive access. Here, we review the Rich vs. Sparse debate as it relates to a...
Key theories of consciousness predict that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays important roles, but there has been relatively little causal evidence showing that manipulation of activity in the region can broadly affect conscious experiences. A new study provides crucial findings to help resolve this issue, showing that direct pharmacological stimulation of PFC restores wakefulness in...