Nature Communications
May 8, 2026
Nicolás Sánchez-Fuenzalida, Chris Jungerius, Stephen M Fleming et al.
A central challenge in consciousness research is determining whether observers have a conscious experience of a stimulus. However, present/absent detection judgments are often biased by contextual factors, making it difficult to isolate conscious perception from non-perceptual influences. Traditional psychophysical methods struggle to disentangle these components. To address this, we conducted...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 22, 2025
François Stockart, Maor Schreiber, Pietro Amerio et al.
20 citations
The scope of unconscious processing has long been, and still remains, a hotly debated issue. This is driven in part by the current diversity of methods to manipulate and measure perceptual consciousness. Here, we provide ten recommendations and nine outstanding issues about designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting the results of studies on unconscious processing. These...
PLoS Biology
July 1, 2025
Simon van Gaal
1 citation
Several neuronal markers have been proposed to differentiate the global brain states that underly states of consciousness. A new pre-registered study in PLOS Biology compares neural markers of loss of consciousness in flies when awake, asleep, and anesthetized.
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....
Communications Psychology
May 21, 2025
Nicolás Sánchez-Fuenzalida, Simon van Gaal, Stephen M Fleming et al.
3 citations
In noisy perceptual environments, people frequently make decisions based on non-perceptual information to maximize rewards. Therefore, a central problem in psychophysics, metacognition and consciousness research is to distinguish between decisions resulting from changes in subjective experience and those arising from non-perceptual information. It has recently been proposed that confidence...
eNeuro
September 1, 2024
Simone Ciceri, Matthijs N Oude Lohuis, Vivi Rottschäfer et al.
Conscious reportability of visual input is associated with a bimodal neural response in the primary visual cortex (V1): an early-latency response coupled to stimulus features and a late-latency response coupled to stimulus report or detection. This late wave of activity, central to major theories of consciousness, is thought to be driven by the prefrontal cortex (PFC), responsible for...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2022
Jolien C. Francken, L. Beerendonk, D. Molenaar et al.
96 citations
Abstract We report the results of an academic survey into the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions, and the current state of the field of consciousness research. The survey consisted of 22 questions and was distributed on two different occasions of the annual meeting of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2018 and 2019). We examined responses from...
June 14, 2021
Jolien C. Francken, L. Beerendonk, D. Molenaar et al.
23 citations
preprint
We report the results of an academic survey into the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions and the current state of the field of consciousness science. The survey consisted of 22 questions, was distributed online and at two different occasions of the annual meeting of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC, 2018 and 2019), targeting active...
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
Johannes J Fahrenfort, Simon van Gaal
10 citations
Doerig and colleagues put forward the notion that we need hard and theory-neutral criteria by which to arbitrate between empirical (mechanistic) theories of consciousness. However, most of the criteria that they propose are not theory neutral because they focus on functional equivalence between systems. Because empirical theories of consciousness are mechanistic rather than functionalist, we...
bioRxiv
July 9, 2020
Josipa Alilovic, Heleen A. Slagter, Simon van Gaal
preprint
Predictions in the visual domain have been shown to modulate conscious access. Yet, little is known about how predictions may do so and to what extent they need to be consciously implemented to be effective. To address this, we administered an attentional blink (AB) task in which target 1 (T1) identity predicted target 2 (T2) identity, while participants rated their perceptual awareness of...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2019
Erik L Meijs, Pim Mostert, Heleen A. Slagter et al.
Subjective experience can be influenced by top-down factors, such as expectations and stimulus relevance. Recently, it has been shown that expectations can enhance the likelihood that a stimulus is consciously reported, but the neural mechanisms supporting this enhancement are still unclear. We manipulated stimulus expectations within the attentional blink (AB) paradigm using letters and...
Journal of Vision
June 26, 2015
Yair Pinto, Simon van Gaal, Floris P De Lange et al.
177 citations
How do expectations influence transitions between unconscious and conscious perceptual processing? According to the influential predictive processing framework, perceptual content is determined by predictive models of the causes of sensory signals. On one interpretation, conscious contents arise when predictive models are verified by matching sensory input (minimizing prediction error). On...