Introduction: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has shown encouraging results in patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DoC), yet its efficacy and mechanisms remain unclear. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) tDCS on Coma Recovery Scale-Revised (CRS-R) scores and EEG activity in severely brain-injured DoC patients. Methods: In...
Attention shapes our consciousness content and perception by increasing the probability of becoming aware and/or better encoding a selection of the incoming inner or outer sensory world. Engaging interoceptive and exteroceptive attention should elicit distinctive neural responses to visceral and external stimuli and could be useful in detecting covert command-following in unresponsive patients....
Abstract The clinical and fundamental exploration of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DoC) is commonly used by researchers both to test some of their key theoretical predictions and to serve as a unique source of empirical knowledge about possible dissociations between consciousness and cognitive and/or neural processes. For instance, the existence of states of vigilance free...
Pupil dilation has been reliably identified as a physiological marker of consciously reportable mental effort. This classical finding raises the question of whether or not pupil dilation could be a specific somatic signature of conscious processing. In order to explore this possibility, we engaged healthy volunteers in the 'local global' auditory paradigm we previously designed to disentangle...