Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.
In our ASSC20 symposium, “Does unconscious perception really exist?”, the four of us asked some difficult questions about the purported phenomenon of unconscious perception, disagreeing on a number of points. This disagreement reflected the objective of the symposium: not only to come together to discuss a single topic of keen interest to the ASSC community, but to do so in a way that would...
This chapter considers some implications of broad principles of the neural architecture and neural coding of information in the visual system. J. H Reynolds and R. Desimone suggest that attentional shrinkage of receptive fields around attended objects serves to solve the binding problem. Attention serves to optimise the veridicality of responses of cells involved in coding complex properties of...