May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
Frontiers in Psychology
2023
Marius Usher, Niccolò Negro, Hilla Jacobson et al.
7 citations
In this paper, we revisit the debate surrounding the Unfolding Argument (UA) against causal structure theories of consciousness (as well as the hard-criteria research program it prescribes), using it as a platform for discussing theoretical and methodological issues in consciousness research. Causal structure theories assert that consciousness depends on a particular causal structure of the...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2023
Angus Leung, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Mediano et al. (The strength of weak integrated information theory. Trends Cogn Sci 2022;26: 646-55.) separate out strong and weak flavours of the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. They describe 'strong IIT' as attempting to derive a universal formula for consciousness and 'weak IIT' as searching for empirically measurable correlates of aspects of consciousness. We put...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2023
Kelvin J. McQueen, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its...
Consciousness and Cognition
May 1, 2022
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Steven Phillips, Hayato Saigo
Qualitative relationships between two instances of conscious experiences can be quantified through the perceived similarity. Previously, we proposed that by defining similarity relationships as arrows and conscious experiences as objects, we can define a category of qualia in the context of category theory. However, the example qualia categories we proposed were highly idealized and limited to...
Royal Society open science
May 1, 2022
Liang Qianchen, Regan M Gallagher, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Upon a brief glance, how well can we differentiate what we see from what we do not? Previous studies answered this question as 'poorly'. This is in stark contrast with our everyday experience. Here, we consider the possibility that previous restriction in stimulus variability and response alternatives reduced what participants could express from what they consciously experienced. We introduce a...
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
April 29, 2022
Angus Leung, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
How a system generates conscious experience remains an elusive question. One approach towards answering this is to consider the information available in the system from the perspective of the system itself. Integrated information theory (IIT) proposes a measure to capture this integrated information (Φ). While Φ can be computed at any spatiotemporal scale, IIT posits that it be applied at the...
Frontiers in Psychology
2022
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Hayato Saigo, Steven Phillips
What are the nature of the relationship among qualia, contents of consciousness, and behavioral reports? Traditionally, this type of question has been only addressed via a qualitative and philosophical approach. Some theorists emphasize an incomplete and inaccurate nature of reports of one's own qualia to discourage formal research programs on qualia. Other empirical researchers, however, have...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
October 1, 2021
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Hayato Saigo
Abstract Characterizing consciousness in and of itself is notoriously difficult. Here, we propose an alternative approach to characterize, and eventually define, consciousness through exhaustive descriptions of consciousness’ relationships to all other consciousness. This approach is founded in category theory. Indeed, category theory can prove that two objects A and B in a category can be...
Nature Communications
June 29, 2021
Thomas Andrillon, Angus C. Burns, Teigane Mackay et al.
13 citations
Attentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we studied the behaviour, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants...
PLoS Computational Biology
February 1, 2021
Angus Leung, Dror Cohen, Bruno van Swinderen et al.
The physical basis of consciousness remains one of the most elusive concepts in current science. One influential conjecture is that consciousness is to do with some form of causality, measurable through information. The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) proposes that conscious experience, filled with rich and specific content, corresponds directly to a hierarchically...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2020
William Wong, Valdas Noreika, Levente Móró et al.
35 citations
The Dream Catcher test defines the criteria for a genuine discovery of the neural constituents of phenomenal consciousness. Passing the test implies that some patterns of purely brain-based data directly correspond to the subjective features of phenomenal experience, which would help to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and brain. Here, we conducted the Dream Catcher test for the...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2020
Matthew J Davidson, Irene L Graafsma, Naotsugu Tsuchiya et al.
Perceptual filling-in (PFI) occurs when a physically present visual target disappears from conscious perception, with its location filled-in by the surrounding visual background. These perceptual changes are complete, near instantaneous, and can occur for multiple separate locations simultaneously. Here, we show that contrasting neural activity during the presence or absence of multi-target PFI...
Entropy
December 1, 2019
Georg Northoff, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Hayato Saigo
Consciousness is a central issue in neuroscience, however, we still lack a formal framework that can address the nature of the relationship between consciousness and its physical substrates. In this review, we provide a novel mathematical framework of category theory (CT), in which we can define and study the sameness between different domains of phenomena such as consciousness and its neural...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
August 7, 2019
Matthew J Davidson, Irene L Graafsma, Naotsugu Tsuchiya et al.
preprint
Perceptual filling-in (PFI) occurs when a physically-present visual target disappears from conscious perception, with its location filled in by the surrounding visual background. Compared to other visual illusions, these perceptual changes are crisp and simple, and can occur for multiple spatially-separated targets simultaneously. Contrasting neural activity during the presence or absence of...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
May 27, 2019
William Wong, Valdas Noreika, Levente Móró et al.
preprint
The Dream Catcher test defines the criteria for a genuine discovery of the neural constituents of phenomenal consciousness. Passing the test implies that some patterns of purely brain-based data directly correspond to the subjective features of phenomenal experience, which would help to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and brain. Here, we conducted the Dream Catcher test for the...
Science
January 25, 2018
Olivia Carter, Jakob Hohwy, Jeroen J A Van Boxtel et al.
86 citations
In their Review “What is consciousness, and could machines have it?” (27 October 2017, p. [486][1]), S. Dehaene et al. argue that the science of consciousness indicates that we are not on the verge of creating conscious machines. However, Dehaene et al. ask and answer the wrong questions. To
Journal of Neuroscience
October 4, 2017
Melanie Boly, Marcello Massimini, Naotsugu Tsuchiya et al.
591 citations
The role of the frontal cortex in consciousness remains a matter of debate. In this Perspective, we will critically review the clinical and neuroimaging evidence for the involvement of the front versus the back of the cortex in specifying conscious contents and discuss promising research avenues. Dual Perspectives Companion Paper: Should a Few Null Findings Falsify Prefrontal Theories of...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2017
Andrew M. Haun, Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch et al.
97 citations
It has been argued that the bandwidth of perceptual experience is low-that the richness of experience is illusory and that the amount of visual information observers can perceive and remember is extremely limited. However, the evidence suggests that this postulated poverty of experiential content is illusory and that visual phenomenology is immensely rich. To properly estimate perceptual...
eNeuro
2017
Andrew M. Haun, Masafumi Oizumi, Christopher K Kovach et al.
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...
PLoS Computational Biology
June 10, 2016
Masafumi Oizumi, Shun-ichi Amari, Toru Yanagawa et al.
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...
Neurosciences research
June 1, 2016
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Shigeru Taguchi, Hayato Saigo
One of the most mysterious phenomena in science is the nature of conscious experience. Due to its subjective nature, a reductionist approach is having a hard time in addressing some fundamental questions about consciousness. These questions are squarely and quantitatively tackled by a recently developed theoretical framework, called integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. In...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
November 13, 2015
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Melanie Wilke, Stefan Frässle et al.
567 citations
The goal of consciousness research is to reveal the neural basis of phenomenal experience. To study phenomenology, experimenters seem obliged to ask reports from the subjects to ascertain what they experience. However, we argue that the requirement of reports has biased the search for the neural correlates of consciousness over the past decades. More recent studies attempt to dissociate neural...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
October 15, 2015
Masafumi Oizumi, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, S. Amari
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...
arXiv Preprint Archive
October 15, 2015
Masafumi Oizumi, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Shun-ichi Amari
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...