Consciousness and Cognition
June 2012
Jakob Hohwy
What Joseph Neisser calls for is exactly right: more philosophy of science will help us better understand and refine the idea of neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). But (i) the key bit of philosophy of science Neisser appeals to is itself in need of clarification; (ii) the orthodox NCC definition is more resourceful than Neisser allows, and (iii) it is possible to resist the...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2012
Alexander A Fingelkurts, Andrew A Fingelkurts, Sergio Bagnato et al.
91 citations
The value of resting electroencephalogram (EEG) in revealing neural constitutes of consciousness (NCC) was examined. We quantified the dynamic repertoire, duration and oscillatory type of EEG microstates in eyes-closed rest in relation to the degree of expression of clinical self-consciousness. For NCC a model was suggested that contrasted normal, severely disturbed state of consciousness and...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2012
E G Milán, O Iborra, M Hochel et al.
15 citations
In a variety of synaesthesia, photisms result from affect-laden stimuli as emotional words, or faces of familiar people. For R, who participated in this study, the sight of a familiar person triggers a mental image of "a human silhouette filled with colour". Subjective descriptions of synaesthetic experiences induced by the visual perception of people's figures and faces show similarities with...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 2012
Marco Sperduti, Pénélope Martinelli, Pascale Piolino
Meditation comprises a series of practices mainly developed in eastern cultures aiming at controlling emotions and enhancing attentional processes. Several authors proposed to divide meditation techniques in focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) techniques. Previous studies have reported differences in brain networks underlying FA and OM. On the other hand common activations across...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2012
J G Taylor
We discuss experimental support for the existence of a corollary discharge signal of attention movement control and its formulation in terms of the corollary discharge of attention model of attention movement (CODAM). The data is from fMRI, MEG and EEG activity observed about 200 ms after stimulus onset in various attention paradigms and in which the activity is mainly sited in parietal and...
Consciousness and Cognition
January 10, 2012
Gráinne Schäfer, Amanda Feilding, Celia J. A. Morgan et al.
60 citations
Cannabis acutely increases schizotypy and chronic use is associated with elevated rates of psychosis. Creative individuals have higher levels of schizotypy, however links between cannabis use, schizotypy and creativity have not been investigated. We investigated the effects of cannabis smoked naturalistically on schizotypy and divergent thinking, a measure of creativity. One hundred and sixty...
Consciousness and Cognition
January 5, 2012
Philip Gerrans
Standard accounts of delusion explain them as responses to experience. Cognitive models of feature binding in the face recognition systems explain how experiences of mismatch between feelings of "familiarity" and faces can arise. Similar mismatches arise in phenomena such as déjà and jamais vu in which places and scenes are mismatched to feelings of familiarity. These cognitive models also...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 11, 2011
Christopher T Burris, Eugene Lai
Based on the assumption that confrontation with one's physical reflection can be aversive, we explored the appeal of possible "escape routes" when incidentally exposed to one's mirror image. Compared to their no-exposure peers, individuals who felt less chronically "trapped" in their bodies showed increased interest in flow experiences and decreased interest in experiences involving low-level...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Martin Desseilles, Thien Thanh Dang‐Vu, Virginie Sterpenich et al.
Dream is a state of consciousness characterized by internally-generated sensory, cognitive and emotional experiences occurring during sleep. Dream reports tend to be particularly abundant, with complex, emotional, and perceptually vivid experiences after awakenings from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This is why our current knowledge of the cerebral correlates of dreaming, mainly derives from...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Nic Hooper, Nathan Davies, Laura Davies et al.
The current study compared thought suppression, focused attention (mindfulness) and unfocused attention as strategies for managing spider fear. Spider fearful participants were exposed to a strategy induction before completing a Behavioural Approach Test (BAT). The BAT is a 10 step measurement of how close participants are willing to move towards a spider. Participants were instructed to use...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Reza Amini, Catherine Sabourin, Joseph De Koninck
Scientific study of dreams requires the most objective methods to reliably analyze dream content. In this context, artificial intelligence should prove useful for an automatic and non subjective scoring technique. Past research has utilized word search and emotional affiliation methods, to model and automatically match human judges' scoring of dream report's negative emotional tone. The current...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Marie-Thérèse Saurat, Maité Agbakou, Patricia Attigui et al.
To test if dreams contain remote or never-experienced motor skills, we collected during 6 weeks dream reports from 15 paraplegics and 15 healthy subjects. In 9/10 subjects with spinal cord injury and in 5/5 with congenital paraplegia, voluntary leg movements were reported during dream, including feelings of walking (46%), running (8.6%), dancing (8%), standing up (6.3%), bicycling (6.3%), and...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Maria Alessandria, Roberto Vetrugno, Pietro Cortelli et al.
While dreaming amputees often experience a normal body image and the phantom limb may not be present. However, dreaming experiences in amputees have mainly been collected by questionnaires. We analysed the dream reports of amputated patients with phantom limb collected after awakening from REM sleep during overnight videopolysomnography (VPSG). Six amputated patients underwent overnight VPSG...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Allan Hobson, Ursula Voss
Dreaming and waking are two brain-mind states, which are characterized by shared and differentiated properties at the levels of brain and consciousness. As part of our effort to capitalize on a comparison of these two states we have applied Edelman's distinction between primary and secondary consciousness, which we link to dreaming and waking respectively. In this paper we examine the...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Adrian G Guggisberg, Sarang S Dalal, Armin Schnider et al.
We explored the neural mechanisms allowing humans to report the subjective onset times of conscious events. Magnetoencephalographic recordings of neural oscillations were obtained while human subjects introspected the timing of sensory, intentional, and motor events during a forced choice task. Brain activity was reconstructed with high spatio-temporal resolution. Event-time introspection was...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
David Gamez, Igor Aleksander
A number of people have suggested that there is a link between information integration and consciousness, and a number of algorithms for calculating information integration have been put forward. The most recent of these is Balduzzi and Tononi's state-based Φ algorithm, which has factorial dependencies that severely limit the number of neurons that can be analyzed. To address this issue an...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Daniel Collerton, Elaine K. Perry
Comparing the phenomenology, neurochemical pathology, and psychopharmacology of hallucinations and dreaming is limited by the available data. Evidence to date reveals no simple correspondence between the two states. Differences in the phenomenology of visual hallucinations and the visual component of dreams may reflect variations in visual context acting on the same underlying mechanism - the...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2011
Michael Schredl
Dreaming in patients with schizophrenia was and is of particular interest to researchers and clinicians due to the phenomenological similarities between the dreaming state and schizophrenic daytime symptomatology such as bizarre thoughts or hallucinations. Extensive literature reviews have shown that dream studies in the field of psychopathology often do not fulfill common scientific criteria....
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Frederick Travis, Harald S. Harung, Yvonne Lagrosen
This study compared professional and amateur classical musicians matched for age, gender, and education on reaction times during the Stroop color-word test, brainwaves during an auditory ERP task and during paired reaction-time tasks, responses on the Gibbs Sociomoral Reflection questionnaire, and self-reported frequencies of peak experiences. Professional musicians were characterized by: (1)...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Miranda Occhionero, Piera Carla Cicogna
Autoscopic phenomena (AP) are complex experiences that include the visual illusory reduplication of one's own body. From a phenomenological point of view, we can distinguish three conditions: autoscopic hallucinations, heautoscopy, and out-of-body experiences. The dysfunctional pattern involves multisensory disintegration of personal and extrapersonal space perception. The etiology, generally...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Ivan Limosani, Armando D'Agostino, Maria Laura Manzone et al.
Several independent lines of research in neurobiology seem to support the phenomenologically-grounded view of the dreaming brain/mind as a useful model for psychosis. Hallucinatory phenomena and thought disorders found in psychosis share several peculiarities with dreaming, where internally generated, vivid sensorimotor imagery along with often heightened and incongruous emotion are paired with...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2011
Kristian Sandberg, Bo Martin Bibby, Bert Timmermans et al.
When consciousness is examined using subjective ratings, the extent to which processing is conscious or unconscious is often estimated by calculating task performance at the subjective threshold or by calculating the correlation between accuracy and awareness. However, both these methods have certain limitations. In the present article, we propose describing task accuracy and awareness as...
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2011
Filip Van Opstal, Cristian Buc Calderon, Wim Gevers et al.
An important approach to understand how the brain gives rise to consciousness is to probe the depth of unconscious processing, thus to define the key features that cause conscious awareness. Here, we investigate the possibility for subliminal stimuli to shape the context for unconscious processing. Context effects have generally been assumed to require consciousness. In the present experiment,...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 17, 2011
Morten Overgaard, Thor Grünbaum
In a recent paper, Brogaard (2011) presents counter-arguments to the conclusions of an experiment with blindsight subject GR. She argues that contrary to the apparent findings that GR's preserved visual abilities relate to degraded visual experiences, she is in fact fully unconscious of the stimuli she correctly identifies. In this paper, we present arguments and evidence why Brogaard's...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2011
Erica Cosentino
13 citations
Time has been considered a crucial factor in distinguishing between two levels of self-awareness: the "core," or "minimal self," and the "extended," or "narrative self." Herein, I focus on this last concept of the self and, in particular, on the relationship between the narrative self and language. In opposition to the claim that the narrative self is a linguistic construction, my idea is that...