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...
Visual mental imagery-the ability to generate percept-like experiences in the absence of external stimuli-varies widely across individuals, from vivid visualization to aphantasia, the reported absence of imagery. Evidence from neurological patients and functional neuroimaging converges to challenge the classical view that imagery depends on the reactivation of the early visual cortex. Instead,...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
Attention is considered as one of the pre-requisites of conscious perception. Phasic alerting and exogenous orienting improve conscious perception of near-threshold information through segregated brain networks. Using a multimodal neuroimaging approach, combining data from functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), we investigated the influence of white matter properties of the...
Only a small fraction of all the information reaching our senses can be the object of conscious report or voluntary action. Although some models propose that different attentional states (top-down amplification and vigilance) are necessary for conscious perception, few studies have explored how the brain activations associated with different attentional systems (such as top-down orienting and...
The quest for the neural correlates of consciousness has led to controversial results. When contrasting consciously seen versus unseen stimuli, some authors have proposed that consciousness is related to activity in visual areas along the ventral cortical visual stream, while others propose the implication of parietal and frontal regions ( Dehaene and Changeux 2011). When invisibility is caused...
The relationships between spatial attention and conscious perception are currently the object of intense debate. Recent evidence of double dissociations between attention and consciousness cast doubt on the time-honored concept of attention as a gateway to consciousness. Here we review evidence from behavioral, neurophysiologic, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging experiments, showing that...
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we asked participants to perform a visual target detection task with peripheral cues. In the first part of the experiment, cues were not predictive of the side of occurrence of the incoming target. In the second part of the experiment, unbeknownst to the participants, cues became 80% predictive, thus inducing an endogenous orienting of spatial...