Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2022
Axel Cleeremans, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
97 citations
Consciousness is not a mere byproduct of brain activity but has a function: subjective experience carries intrinsic value that motivates action. The authors propose the 'phenomenal worthiness' hypothesis, arguing that agents act because they experience and care about those experiences. This value-laden quality allows comparison of different experiences in a unified, subject-centered space, explaining why consciousness feels unified. If phenomenal experience has intrinsic value, then consciousness must have a function, making the hard problem of consciousness more tractable by reframing it as a problem about function.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 22, 2025
François Stockart, Maor Schreiber, Pietro Amerio et al.
20 citations
The scope of unconscious processing remains hotly debated, driven by diverse methods for manipulating and measuring perceptual awareness. Through dialogue among researchers with varied theoretical backgrounds, ten recommendations and nine outstanding issues are provided for designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting results. These guidelines aim to evoke discussion about norms in studying unconscious processes and help researchers make informed decisions. While some recommendations may not align with existing approaches and will likely evolve, they are intended to foster a more convergent understanding of the extent and limits of unconscious processing.
Frontiers in Science
October 30, 2025
Axel Cleeremans, L. Mudrik, A. Seth
17 citations
Understanding the biophysical basis of consciousness remains a major challenge for 21st-century science, made more pressing by advances in artificial intelligence. This article reviews recent developments in the scientific study of consciousness and considers future directions. It highlights novel approaches that may facilitate breakthroughs, including greater attention to theory development, adversarial collaborations, a focus on the phenomenal character of conscious experiences, and new methodologies and ecological experimental designs. The authors explore what success in consciousness science may look like, emphasizing clinical, ethical, societal, and scientific implications. Progress will reshape how we see ourselves and our relationship to AI and the natural world, usher in new medical interventions, and inform discussions on nonhuman animal welfare and ethical concerns around the beginning and end of human life.
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Léa Moncoucy, Krzysztof Dołęga, Catherine Tallon-Baudry et al.
5 citations
Phenomenal experience—what it feels like to be an organism—has intrinsic value that cannot be reduced to evolutionary cost-benefit calculations. While all organisms act for reasons shaped by extrinsic evolutionary pressures, some also act for reasons of their own, sometimes even in ways detrimental to their survival. This shift marks a fundamental change in nature: subjective experience broadens an organism's capacity to act not merely in response to objective evolutionary value but also according to preference-driven subjective value associated with items, situations, events, or other agents. Subjective value can serve both as a driver of behavior and as a target for behavior, making it irreducible to extrinsic forms of value.
Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science
January 1, 2024
Pietro Amerio, Matthias Michel, Stephan Goerttler et al.
5 citations
Comparing conscious and unconscious perception is central to consciousness science, but many studies fail to control for criterion biases when assessing awareness. In this study, observers tried to discriminate subjectively invisible offsets of Vernier stimuli, with visibility probed using a bias-free task. Stimuli were made less visible by backward masking or very brief presentation (1-3 milliseconds) using a modern tachistoscope. Some behavioral indicators of perception without awareness appeared, but no conclusive evidence emerged. Bayesian observer model simulations, including models generating visibility judgments alongside type-1 judgments, best fit observers with slightly suboptimal conscious access to sensory evidence. The stimuli and manipulations produced mild blindsight-like behavior, suitable for future investigation.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2026
Alicia Franco-Martínez, Ricardo Rey-Sáez, Jesús Adrián-ventura et al.
1 citation
Working memory may operate on unconscious perceptual contents, though it remains linked to conscious perception. A large, multisite replication (19 labs, 531 participants, 720 trials) of Soto et al. (2011) found above-chance accuracy (.55) on a visual discrimination task when participants reported not seeing the subliminal Gabor grating. Performance correlated positively with cue detection sensitivity (r = .228), and the regression intercept was significantly above chance (β₀ = .521). The study provides an open-access dataset and confirms that measures were reliable and valid, supporting the existence of unconscious working memory.
Affective Science
June 30, 2026
Lena Lange, Axel Cleeremans
The role of consciousness in motivation is examined, questioning whether unconscious incentives can drive goal pursuit. A critical review of empirical and theoretical works supporting unconscious motivation contrasts them with a valence-centered account. Recent methodological advances in unconscious processing raise concerns about accurately assessing perceptual awareness in previous cognitive neuroscience experiments that proposed alternative processing routes for unconscious external reward cues. A conflation of automatic behavior responses with intentional, motivated behavior is discussed. The subjective experience of valence, a fundamental aspect of phenomenal consciousness, is argued to be the core organizing principle of human intentional behavior, supported by findings that affective evaluation is integral to perceptual experience.
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior
June 1, 2026
Audrey Mazancieux, Axel Cleeremans, Adélaïde De Heering
Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) recorded during frequency-tagging can track both objective and subjective conscious perception of faces. In 32 participants viewing image sequences at 6 Hz with faces every fifth image, presented at either 1% or 1.5% contrast, the face-related brain signal at 1.5% contrast was higher during correct gender categorisation than incorrect categorisation and increased linearly with both visibility and confidence ratings. At 1% contrast, no face perception occurred behaviourally, and no brain response to faces was detected. Attention, monitored via a fixation-cross task, related more closely to confidence than visibility. These findings indicate SSVEPs can serve as a marker of conscious perception.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2025
Charlotte Van den Driessche, Clotilde Chappé, Mahiko Konishi et al.
The stream of thought can be partitioned into five distinct mental states: focus, task-related interference, external distraction, daydream, and blank. This classification, called the Classification of Mental States (CoMS-5T), was tested for validity. Participants gave free verbal reports of their mental contents, which external raters then classified, supporting the construct validity and neutrality of the system. A reanalysis of a large dataset from Beikmohamadi and Meier (2022) found distinct behavioral signatures for four of the five states, providing criterion validity. The work offers a systematic way to describe and measure the ongoing stream of thought in cognitive psychology.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
March 1, 2024
Tim Bayne, Anil K. Seth, Marcello Massimini et al.
New tests for consciousness (C-tests) are urgently needed to resolve uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent developments in AI, neural organoids, and xenobot technology. Existing C-tests are of limited use, and no tests exist for many critical populations. The paper identifies challenges facing any attempt to develop C-tests, proposes a multidimensional classification of such tests, and identifies strategies for validating them.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2022
Howard Bowman, William Jones, Hannah Pincham et al.
When people see two stimuli in rapid succession, the second one is often missed—a phenomenon called the attentional blink. But a new dissociation has been found: while the brain can encode both stimuli into working memory, people consciously experience only the first. This gap between objective encoding and subjective experience, called the meta-experiential blink, grows larger under greater perceptual overload. The findings suggest that the ability to reflect on one's own visual experience (meta-experience) can decouple from what is actually encoded. Computational modeling using the reSTST model, which simulates parallel encoding but serial conscious experience, fits both behavioral and EEG data. This work challenges theories of consciousness, including global workspace theory and higher-order theories, by showing that conscious experience may be inherently serial even when encoding is parallel.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
February 1, 2020
Axel Cleeremans, Dalila Achoui, Arnaud Beauny et al.
A novel framework called the self-organizing metarepresentational account (SOMA) proposes that consciousness is something the brain learns to do. The brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, developing systems of metarepresentations that qualify target first-order representations. Experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned they possess certain first-order states and have learned to care more about some states than others. Consciousness is thus the brain's unconscious, embodied, enactive, nonconceptual theory about itself.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2019
Monika Derda, Marcin Koculak, Bert Windey et al.
Electrophysiological signatures of visual awareness can be distinguished from other task-related processes by manipulating the level of processing of visual stimuli. In an EEG experiment, 36 subjects performed either color (low-level) or magnitude (high-level) evaluations of masked digits and rated their subjective visibility. Mean amplitude in the VAN component time window (140-240 ms) correlated with visibility ratings in both conditions. Mean amplitude in the LP time window (380-480 ms) correlated with visibility ratings only in the high-level condition. These results support a temporal unfolding of ERP markers of conscious processing: an early component reflects initial perceptual experience, while a late component correlates with conscious experience of non-perceptual information.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2017
Marek Binder, Krzysztof Gociewicz, Bert Windey et al.
Transitions from unconscious to conscious perception may be more gradual for low-level visual features and more dichotomous for high-level features. In an fMRI study using backward masking, participants reported a target digit's magnitude (high-level) or its color (low-level) and rated visibility. Intermediate visibility was reported more often in the low-level task, supporting the levels-of-processing hypothesis. Visible targets activated insulo-fronto-parietal regions in both tasks, while visual areas showed higher activity in the low-level task across all visibility levels. The findings suggest that attentional modulation of feature-representing brain regions mediates how processing level shapes conscious perception.
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
February 4, 2017
D. Terhune, Axel Cleeremans, Amir Raz et al.
Hypnosis is a top-down regulatory process in which verbal suggestions produce pronounced changes in psychological phenomena. It serves both as a technique for studying consciousness and as a therapeutic method for symptoms. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the characteristics and neurocognitive mechanisms of hypnosis, drawing on evidence from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychopathology, and clinical psychology. It discusses hypnosis as an experimental method for modulating consciousness, a model for studying healthy and pathological cognition, and a therapeutic tool. The review also relates hypnosis to broader suggestion and suggestibility, identifies challenges in the cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis, and outlines future research directions.
Neural networks : the official journal of the International Neural Network Society
November 1, 2007
Axel Cleeremans, Bert Timmermans, Antoine Pasquali
Consciousness involves not only being aware of something but also being aware that one is aware. This paper explores computational mechanisms that could implement this idea, starting from the observation that connectionist networks acquire knowledge that remains embedded in their task performance—knowledge in the network rather than knowledge for the network. The authors present simulations where a second-order network observes the internal states of a first-order network trained on a categorization task. The second-order network either reproduces those states or uses them as cues for a secondary task, achieving a limited form of metarepresentation. This mechanism offers a beginning for understanding mental attitudes and suggests that consciousness involves learned knowledge of one's own internal representations through interaction with self, world, and others.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
August 1, 2005
Tiago V Maia, Axel Cleeremans
Selective attention, working memory, and cognitive control arise from competition between widely distributed neural representations, biased by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex. Connectionist models implementing this competition share key features with models of global workspace theory, all relying on global constraint satisfaction. This review argues that these models are relevant for understanding consciousness.