Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Léa Moncoucy, Krzysztof Dołęga, Catherine Tallon-Baudry et al.
5 citations
DC. Dennett (2020,personal communication) asked: 'How do we go from doing things for reasons to having reasons for doing things?'. This question targets a fundamental shift in nature: while all organisms act in the way they do for reasons that are shaped by extrinsic evolutionary cost functions, some also act for reasons of their own, even engaging in behaviour that may be detrimental to their...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2022
Axel Cleeremans, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
97 citations
'Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?' In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience-'What it feels like'-is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value...
Journal of Neuroscience
March 23, 2021
Diego Candia‐rivera, Jitka Annen, Olivia Gosseries et al.
81 citations
The neural monitoring of visceral inputs might play a role in first-person perspective (i.e., the unified viewpoint of subjective experience). In healthy participants, how the brain responds to heartbeats, measured as the heartbeat-evoked response (HER), correlates with perceptual, bodily, and self-consciousness. Here we show that HERs in resting-state EEG data distinguishes between...
Nature Human Behaviour
February 1, 2019
M. Michel, Diane M Beck, Ned Block et al.
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.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
May 11, 2016
Florence Campana, Ignacio Rebollo, Anne Urai et al.
The reverse hierarchy theory (Hochstein and Ahissar, 2002) makes strong, but so far untested, predictions on conscious vision. In this theory, local details encoded in lower-order visual areas are unconsciously processed before being automatically and rapidly combined into global information in higher-order visual areas, where conscious percepts emerge. Contingent on current goals, local...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
May 5, 2014
Hyeong-Dong Park, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
The report 'I saw the stimulus' operationally defines visual consciousness, but where does the 'I' come from? To account for the subjective dimension of perceptual experience, we introduce the concept of the neural subjective frame. The neural subjective frame would be based on the constantly updated neural maps of the internal state of the body and constitute a neural referential from which...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2012
Ying Liu, Anne-Lise Paradis, Lydia Yahia-Cherif et al.
There is converging evidence that electrophysiological responses over posterior cortical regions in the 200-300 ms range distinguish between physically identical stimuli that reach consciousness or remain unseen. Here, we attempt at determining the sources of this awareness-related activity using magneto-encephalographic (MEG). Fourteen subjects were presented with faint colored gratings at...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 16, 2011
Valentin Wyart, Stanislas Dehaene, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPATIAL ATTENTION AND CONSCIOUS ACCESS HAS OFTEN BEEN PICTURED AS A SINGLE CAUSAL LINK: spatial attention would provide conscious access to weak stimuli by increasing their effective contrast during early visual processing. To test this hypothesis, we assessed whether the early attentional amplification of visual responses, around 100 ms following stimulus onset, had a...
Frontiers in Psychology
2011
Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Consciousness, as described in the experimental literature, is a multi-faceted phenomenon, that impinges on other well-studied concepts such as attention and control. Do consciousness and attention refer to different aspects of the same core phenomenon, or do they correspond to distinct functions? One possibility to address this question is to examine the neural mechanisms underlying...