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...
Whether qualitative aspects of consciousness, or qualia in short, are equivalent across individuals is a foundational scientific question. Testing this is challenging because one cannot assume a shared mapping between stimuli and private experience (my “red” may be your “green”) [1–3]. Previously, we proposed a structural characterization of qualia [4, 5] and the quantitative assessment of...
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...
The effects of top-down attention on perception have been intensively studied using binary categorization tasks (e.g., seen vs. unseen). However, such tasks poorly characterise the quality of experience, or qualia, for short. To characterise attentional effects on qualia, we combined a dual-task attention paradigm with similarity rating tasks to examine whether relational structures of qualia...
Qualia, the subjective qualities of experience, pose a fundamental challenge to scientific explanation. A promising recent approach is to characterize qualia by their relational structures rather than their intrinsic nature. Assuming the structure of qualia is characterized by the geometry of neural representations, we posit that this geometry is fundamentally organized by symmetry. We propose...
The brain comprises a complex network of interacting regions. To understand the roles and mechanisms of this intricate network, it is crucial to elucidate its structural features related to cognitive functions. Recent empirical evidence suggests that both feedforward and feedback signals are necessary for conscious perception, emphasizing the importance of subnetworks with bidirectional...
Whether one person's subjective experience of the "redness" of red is equivalent to another's is a fundamental question in consciousness studies. Intersubjective comparison of the relational structures of sensory experiences, termed "qualia structures", can constrain the question. We propose an unsupervised alignment method, based on optimal transport, to find the optimal mapping between the...
Top-down attentional amplification is often assumed to affect 'what' we see, that is, the contents of conscious experience. Previously, this claim has been examined by studies that manipulated attention and characterized conscious perception in binary categorical labels (e.g. seen versus unseen). However, these categorical judgments are not powerful enough to characterize the quality of...
Abstract The common neural mechanisms underlying the reduction of consciousness during sleep and anesthesia remain unclear. Previous studies have examined changes in network structure only using recordings with limited spatial resolution, which has hindered the investigation of the critical spatial scales from the micro (single neurons) to the meso (groups of neurons) for the reduction of...
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...
To what extent are sensory experiences equivalent between individuals? One promising approach to this fundamental question about consciousness is to intersubjectively compare the similarity relationships of sensory experiences, named "qualia structures". Conventional methods for comparing the similarity relationships largely sidestep the issue by assuming experiences evoked by the same stimuli...
Where in the brain consciousness resides remains unclear. It has been suggested that the subnetworks supporting consciousness should be bidirectionally (recurrently) connected because both feed-forward and feedback processing are necessary for conscious experience. Accordingly, evaluating which subnetworks are bidirectionally connected and the strength of these connections would likely aid the...
The ability to integrate information in the brain is considered to be an essential property for cognition and consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) hypothesizes that the amount of integrated information ( Φ ) in the brain is related to the level of consciousness. IIT proposes that, to quantify information integration in a system as a whole, integrated information should be measured...
The ability to integrate information in the brain is considered to be an essential property for cognition and consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) hypothesizes that the amount of integrated information ($Φ$) in the brain is related to the level of consciousness. IIT proposes that to quantify information integration in a system as a whole, integrated information should be measured...
A significant problem in neuroscience concerns the distinction between neural processing that is correlated with conscious percepts from processing that is not. Here, we tested if a hierarchical structure of causal interactions between neuronal populations correlates with conscious perception. We derived the hierarchical causal structure as a pattern of integrated information, inspired by the...
Accumulating evidence indicates that the capacity to integrate information in the brain is a prerequisite for consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness provides a mathematical approach to quantifying the information integrated in a system, called integrated information, Φ. Integrated information is defined theoretically as the amount of information a system generates...
Abstract Integrated information theory postulates that the particular way stimuli appear when we consciously experience them arises from integrated information relationships across neural populations. We investigated if such equivalence holds by testing if similar/different percepts map onto similar/different information structures. We computed integrated information structure from intracranial...
We propose a unified theoretical framework for quantifying spatio-temporal interactions in a stochastic dynamical system based on information geometry. In the proposed framework, the degree of interactions is quantified by the divergence between the actual probability distribution of the system and a constrained probability distribution where the interactions of interest are disconnected. This...
Significance Measuring the degree of causal influences among multiple elements of a system is a fundamental problem in physics and biology. We propose a unified framework for quantifying any combination of causal relationships between elements in a hierarchical manner based on information geometry. Our measure of integration, called geometrical integrated information, quantifies the strength of...
Accumulating evidence indicates that the capacity to integrate information in the brain is a prerequisite for consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness provides a mathematical approach to quantifying the information integrated in a system, called integrated information, $Φ$. Integrated information is defined theoretically as the amount of information a system generates...
A meaningful set of stimuli, such as a sequence of frames from a movie, triggers a set of different experiences. By contrast, a meaningless set of stimuli, such as a sequence of 'TV noise' frames, triggers always the same experience--of seeing 'TV noise'--even though the stimuli themselves are as different from each other as the movie frames. We reasoned that the differentiation of cortical...
This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness 3.0, which incorporates several advances over previous formulations. IIT starts from phenomenological axioms: information says that each experience is specific – it is what it is by how it differs from alternative experiences; integration says that it is unified – irreducible to non-interdependent components; exclusion...
Whether one person’s experience of “red” is equivalent to another’s has long been considered unanswerable. One promising approach to this fundamental question about consciousness is the intersubjective comparison of the similarity relations of sensory experiences, termed “qualia structures”. Conventional methods for comparing similarity relations largely sidestep the issue, assuming that...