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...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 23, 2025
Tadahiro Taniguchi, Masafumi Oizumi, Noburo Saji et al.
1 citation
This perspective paper explores the bidirectional influence between language emergence and the relational structure of subjective experiences, termed qualia structure, and lays out a constructive approach to the intricate dependency between the two. We hypothesize that the emergence of languages with distributional semantics (e.g., syntactic-semantic structures) is linked to the coordination of...
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...
July 15, 2023
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Hayato Saigo, Steven Phillips et al.
preprint
Summary: Establishing Qualia Structure Paradigm.?Do subjective conscious experience and objective brain matters belong to completely different worlds? How are qualia, the contents of consciousness, related to the brain? The question of consciousness and the brain is not only of scientific interest, but it is also directly related to the problems associated with difficulties in understanding...
July 15, 2023
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Hayato Saigo, Steven Phillips et al.
preprint
主観意識と客観的な物質としての脳は、全く異なる世界に属すのだろうか? 意識の中身であるクオリアと脳はいかに関係しているのか? 意識と脳の問題は、科学的な興味に留まらず、現実社会における人の気持ちの理解の困難に伴う問題にも直接関わる。意識のクオリアは、客観的な言語で定義することすら難しいため、従来の意識研究では、知覚刺激を固定し、経験を「見えた・見えない」という二値的な判断に還元し、その神経相関の探求を試みた。近年、我々は視覚クオリア間の類似度を大規模に計測することでクオリアの構造を特徴づけ、その神経相関とその情報構造を明らかにする新パラダイムを確立した。本領域は、現象学・発達・構成論を加え、知覚と感情クオリアに集中することで、クオリア構造学を創成する。本領域の成果は、他者意識の理解や、動物や人工物の意識理解など、一般社会へも広く還元されうる答えを生み出す新融合領域の創成である。