PNAS Nexus
July 1, 2026
David 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...
Scientific Data
May 7, 2026
Aya Khalaf, David Richter, Yamil Vidal et al.
We present a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) dataset collected as part of an adversarial collaboration aimed at arbitrating between the Global Neuronal Workspace theory (GNWT) and the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. Participants (N = 118) were presented with suprathreshold visual stimuli belonging to four different categories (faces, objects, letters, false fonts)...
Nature
June 1, 2025
Oscar Ferrante, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin et al.
94 citations
Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity1,2. These theories have independently accrued evidence, but have not been directly compared3. Here we present an open science adversarial collaboration directly juxtaposing integrated information theory (IIT)4,5 and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT)6-10 via a theory-neutral consortium11-13. The theory...
Neuroimage
May 15, 2025
Aya Khalaf, Erick Lopez, Jian Li et al.
6 citations
Subcortical arousal systems are known to play a key role in controlling sustained changes in attention and conscious awareness. Recent studies indicate that these systems have a major influence on short-term dynamic modulation of visual attention, but their role across sensory modalities is not fully understood. In this study, we investigated shared subcortical arousal systems across sensory...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 23, 2023
Oscar Ferrante, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin et al.
preprint
Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity1,2. These theories have independently accrued evidence, yet, confirmation bias and dependence on design choices hamper progress in the field3. Here, we present an open science adversarial collaboration which directly juxtaposes Integrated Information Theory (IIT)4,5 and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT)6–10,...
PLoS One
February 10, 2023
Lucia Melloni, Liad Mudrik, Michael Pitts et al.
106 citations
The relationship between conscious experience and brain activity has intrigued scientists and philosophers for centuries. In the last decades, several theories have suggested different accounts for these relationships. These theories have developed in parallel, with little to no cross-talk among them. To advance research on consciousness, we established an adversarial collaboration between...