PNAS NexusJuly 1, 2026David S Jin, Oumayma Agdali, Taruna Yadav et al.
Awareness of action (AoA), or conscious awareness of an action just performed, is an important part of daily experience with major practical and ethical relevance, yet the neural mechanisms of AoA remain largely unknown. The main barrier to studying AoA is a lack of experimental paradigms to directly compare neural activity in aware versus unaware actions. Borrowing from the field of perceptual...
Consciousness is private. Although conscious beings directly access their own conscious experiences, the consciousness of others must be inferred through overt report: observable behaviours - such as overt facial expressions, vocalizations and body gestures - that suggest the level, state and content of consciousness. However, overt report is limited because it can be erroneous (for example,...
The full neural circuits of conscious perception remain unknown. Using a visual perception task, we directly recorded a subcortical thalamic awareness potential (TAP). We also developed a unique paradigm to classify perceived versus not perceived stimuli using eye measurements to remove confounding signals related to reporting on conscious experiences. Using fMRI, we discovered three major...