Journal of Neuroscience
May 27, 2026
Alfredo Spagna, Jianghao Liu, Paolo Bartolomeo
What neural events precede conscious reports? Hemisphere-asymmetric attentional networks are causally related to conscious perception (Kaufmann et al., 2024; Bartolomeo et al., 2025), but their spectrotemporal dynamics remain unclear. Here, we used magnetoencephalography to examine brain oscillations occurring in human participants (male and female) before a near-threshold target during the...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Silvana Lozito, Stefano Lasaponara, Jianghao Liu et al.
A recent study using intracerebral electroencephalography (EEG) recordings in human patients has documented the electrophysiological correlates of conscious reporting of near-threshold visual targets that followed supra-threshold peripheral spatial cues. Here, we aimed to bridge these intracerebral EEG events with corresponding surface recording, differentiating between conscious and...
Cortex
April 2025
Jianghao Liu, Minye Zhan, Dounia Hajhajate et al.
Most of us effortlessly describe visual objects, whether seen or remembered. Yet, around 4% of people report congenital aphantasia: they struggle to visualize objects despite being able to describe their visual appearance. What neural mechanisms create this disparity between subjective experience and objective performance? Aphantasia can provide novel insights into conscious processing and...
Cortex
September 1, 2023
Jianghao Liu, Paolo Bartolomeo
68 citations
Different individuals experience varying degrees of vividness in their visual mental images. The distribution of these variations across different imagery domains, such as object shape, color, written words, faces, and spatial relationships, remains unknown. To address this issue, we conducted a study with 117 healthy participants who reported different levels of imagery vividness. Of these...
Communications Biology
July 15, 2023
Jianghao Liu, Dimitri J. Bayle, Alfredo Spagna et al.
39 citations
How do attention and consciousness interact in the human brain? Rival theories of consciousness disagree on the role of fronto-parietal attentional networks in conscious perception. We recorded neural activity from 727 intracerebral contacts in 13 epileptic patients, while they detected near-threshold targets preceded by attentional cues. Clustering revealed three neural patterns: first,...
Jianghao Liu
preprint
Mental imagery refers to one’s quasi-perceptual experience in the absence of direct external input. Yet around 4% of individuals with “aphantasia” report an inability to voluntarily generate such experiences. This phenomenon provides a natural experiment that challenges current theories of imagery, which typically assume that reactivation of the visual cortex in imagery generation is sufficient...