bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
September 21, 2026
Ryoichi Watanabe, Jue Wang, Masafumi Oizumi et al.
preprint
Whether subjective colour experience (e.g., experience of 'red') is shared across children and adults remains a foundational question in developmental psychology and consciousness research. To test this, we compared the relational structures of their colour experiences and identified the mapping that best preserved these structures. Using pairwise similarity judgements for 13 basic colours, we...
Scientific Reports
November 3, 2025
Ryoichi Watanabe, Yusuke Moriguchi
Understanding how perception transitions from an unconscious to conscious state is a central aim of visual consciousness research. The threshold is the boundary at which consciousness arises, and the process from unconsciousness to consciousness is the emergent process. Although studies have investigated the thresholds and emergent processes of visual consciousness in adults, how these...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
March 18, 2025
Yusuke Moriguchi, Ryoichi Watanabe, Chifumi Sakata et al.
13 citations
Examination of the subjective qualitative aspects of an experience, or "qualia" in short, is a fundamental and core aspect of consciousness research. How can we characterize the particular quality of redness, i.e. a red quale? Based on a recent proposal of the structural characterization of qualia, which did not rely on verbal descriptions, we developed a task that obtained pairwise similarity...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 10, 2024
Ryoichi Watanabe, Yusuke Moriguchi
IntroductionThe transition of experience from unconscious to conscious, the emergent process, is a crucial topic in consciousness studies. Three frameworks exist to explain the process: (1) consciousness arises in an all-or-none manner; (2) consciousness arises gradually; (3) consciousness arises either all at once or gradually, depending on the level of stimulus processing (low- vs....
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2023
Ryoichi Watanabe, Yusuke Moriguchi
preprint
Visual consciousness studies in humans have primarily focused on adults. However, whether young children's visual consciousness is similar to or different from that of adults remains unknown. This study examined young children's and adults' subjective awareness and objective discrimination for thresholds and emergent processes of visual consciousness in two experiments. In Experiment 1, 20...