Behavioral and Brain Sciences
June 25, 2026
Matan Mazor
In consciousness science, theoretical predictions are often untestable, such as claims about phenomenal consciousness in other beings. This evidential underdetermination, in combination with the perceived moral significance of consciousness, puts consciousness science at risk of becoming a marketplace of rationalizations: a field that produces theories that reaffirm social practices and...
PsyArXiv
March 19, 2026
Matan Mazor, Arianna Risoli, Anna Eberhardt et al.
preprint
Whether an individual is conscious or not has important ethical and legal implications. For example, animal welfare regulations seek to minimize suffering in conscious animals, and AI ethics discussions focus on the possibility of artificial consciousness as a key concern. Critically, consciousness cannot be directly perceived, but must be inferred from external cues such as behaviour and...
Journal of Vision
May 1, 2024
Nadine Dijkstra, Matan Mazor, Stephen M Fleming
9 citations
Perceptual reality monitoring refers to the ability to distinguish internally triggered imagination from externally triggered reality. Such monitoring can take place at perceptual or cognitive levels-for example, in lucid dreaming, perceptual experience feels real but is accompanied by a cognitive insight that it is not real. We recently developed a paradigm to reveal perceptual reality...
Perspectives on Psychological Science
May 2023
Matan Mazor, Simon Brown, Anna Ciaunica et al.
A target question for the scientific study of consciousness is how dimensions of consciousness, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure or reflect on one's own experience, vary in different states and animal species. Considering the tight link between consciousness and moral status, answers to these questions have implications for law and ethics. Here we point out that given this link,...
Journal of Neuroscience
June 1, 2021
Matan Mazor, Nadine Dijkstra, S. Fleming
preprint
A key goal of consciousness science is identifying neural signatures of being aware versus unaware of simple stimuli. This is often investigated in the context of near-threshold detection, with reports of stimulus awareness being linked to heightened activation in a frontoparietal network. However, because of reports of stimulus presence typically being associated with higher confidence than...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 30, 2020
Matan Mazor, Stephen M Fleming
Contrasting brain states when subjects are aware compared to unaware of a presented stimulus has allowed researchers to isolate candidate neural correlates of consciousness. Here we propose that an important next step in this research program is to investigate, perhaps paradoxically, brain states that covary with reports of absences of awareness. Specifically, we propose that in order to...