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...
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...
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...
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...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
April 4, 2017
Johannes J Fahrenfort, Jonathan Van Leeuwen, Christian N L Olivers et al.
102 citations
The visual system has the remarkable ability to integrate fragmentary visual input into a perceptually organized collection of surfaces and objects, a process we refer to as perceptual integration. Despite a long tradition of perception research, it is not known whether access to consciousness is required to complete perceptual integration. To investigate this question, we manipulated access to...