Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
August 27, 2026
Sabine Gnodde, Vlada Aslanov, Abigail Hogan et al.
A central question in consciousness research is whether perceptual awareness is primarily reflected in early posterior sensory activity or in later frontal processes associated with access and report. Empirical tests of these alternatives are challenging because most paradigms rely on explicit perceptual reports, introducing motor and decisional confounds. Here, we used an...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
April 22, 2026
Sabine Gnodde, Vlada Aslanov, Jolien C. Francken et al.
Abstract A central question in consciousness research is whether perceptual awareness arises predominantly from activity in posterior sensory regions or from later frontal processes associated with access and report. Empirical tests of these alternatives are challenging because most paradigms rely on explicit perceptual reports, introducing motor and decisional confounds. Here, we used an...
Elife
June 18, 2025
Samuel Noorman, Timo Stein, Jasper B. Zantvoord et al.
2 citations
Perceptual inference requires the integration of visual features through recurrent processing, the dynamic exchange of information between higher- and lower-level cortical regions. While animal research has demonstrated a crucial role of NMDA receptors in recurrent processing, establishing a causal link between NMDA receptors and recurrent processing in humans has remained challenging. Here, we...
Elife
May 28, 2025
Johannes Jacobus Fahrenfort, Philippa A. Johnson, Niels A. Kloosterman et al.
10 citations
How consciousness arises from brain activity has been a topic of intense scientific research for decades. But how does one identify the neural basis of something that is intrinsically personal and subjective? A hallmark approach has been to ask human observers to judge stimuli as 'seen' (conscious) and 'unseen' (unconscious) and use post hoc sorting of neural measurements based these judgments....
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Joaquim Streicher, Sascha Meyen, Volker H Franz et al.
A central question of consciousness research is which cognitive processes can occur unconsciously. To investigate this, researchers typically compare participants' ability to consciously discriminate a stimulus to their unconscious processing of the same stimulus (e.g. measured via reaction time or brain activity). If participants are not significantly different from chance in the awareness (or...
PLoS Biology
May 1, 2021
Timo Stein, Daniel Kaiser, Johannes J Fahrenfort et al.
The study of unconscious processing requires a measure of conscious awareness. Awareness measures can be either subjective (based on participant's report) or objective (based on perceptual performance). The preferred awareness measure depends on the theoretical position about consciousness and may influence conclusions about the extent of unconscious processing and about the neural correlates...
Cognitive Neuroscience
2021
Yair Pinto, Timo Stein
7 citations
In their paper Doerig et al. argue that we should put the hard problem aside and focus on empirical data to solve the 'easy' problems of consciousness - finding the neural and functional correlates of consciousness. In other words 'shut up and measure'. This has worked well with other thorny issues, such as explaining life, so why not adopt this approach here? We argue that despite the...