A central challenge in consciousness research is to dissociate perception from awareness using rigorous, bias-free methods. Traditional approaches often suffer from two key limitations: the criterion biases in reporting perceptual (un)awareness, and the criterion content fallacy, where awareness measures do not capture the specific information required to perform the perceptual task. These...
Although in recent years some studies have found evidence suggesting that working memory (WM) may operate on unconscious perceptual contents, decisive demonstrations of the existence of unconscious WM are lacking. In the present Registered Report, we replicate the first study on this topic by Soto et al. (Working memory without consciousness. Curr Biol 2011;21:R912-3.): a visual discrimination...
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...
The development of robust frameworks to understand how the human brain represents conscious and unconscious perceptual contents is paramount to make progress in the neuroscience of consciousness. Recent functional MRI studies using multi-voxel pattern classification analyses showed that unconscious contents could be decoded from brain activity patterns. However, decoding does not imply a full...
A target question for the scientific study of consciousness is how dimensions of consciousness, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure or reflect on one's own experience, vary in different states and animal species. Considering the tight link between consciousness and moral status, answers to these questions have implications for law and ethics. Here we point out that given this link,...
Understanding the neural mechanisms of conscious and unconscious experience is a major goal of fundamental and translational neuroscience. Here, we target the early visual cortex with a protocol of noninvasive, high-resolution alternating current stimulation while participants performed a delayed target-probe discrimination task and reveal dissociable mechanisms of mnemonic processing for...
A framework to pinpoint the scope of unconscious processing is critical to improve models of visual consciousness. Previous research observed brain signatures of unconscious processing in visual cortex, but these were not reliably identified. Further, whether unconscious contents are represented in high-level stages of the ventral visual stream and linked parieto-frontal areas remains unknown....