Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Oskar Dragan, Anka Slana Ozimič et al.
8 citations
Working memory is usually measured with psychological tasks that focus on the reliability of outcomes rather than how participants experience the tasks. This study replicated protocols for investigating the lived experience of working memory using a visual span task. Eighteen healthy participants aged 21 to 35 provided subjective reports. Working memory was phenomenologically characterized at three time scales: background feelings, strategies, and tactics. At the level of tactics, transmodality—the transformation of one modality of lived experience into another—was identified as the central dynamic during task performance.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2021
Shaghayegh Konjedi, Reza Maleeh
8 citations
The dynamic framework of mind wandering, which views it as a spontaneous thought phenomenon, is revised by adding the concept of mindful meta-awareness. This integration changes the framework in two key ways: meta-awareness alters how thoughts relate to constraints, so the original criteria for mind wandering no longer apply, and lucid dreaming can be seen as unguided thought that still relies on deliberate constraints. The modified framework may aid in treating mental disorders involving altered spontaneous thought, such as depression and nightmares.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2022
Hilary J Grimmer, Ruben Laukkonen, Anna Freydenzon et al.
6 citations
False insights—moments of sudden, incorrect understanding—can be triggered in anyone under the right conditions, not just people prone to psychosis or delusional thinking. In an experiment with 200 participants who completed an adapted version of the FIAT paradigm, which elicits false 'Aha' moments for unsolvable anagrams, no association was found between these experimentally induced false insights and measures of schizotypy, need for cognition, jumping to conclusions, aberrant salience, faith in intuition, or cognitive reflection. The findings suggest that experiencing false insights may be a general human phenomenon rather than a marker of particular thinking styles or psychosis proneness.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2025
Andy Mckilliam, Manuela Kirberg
5 citations
Mental imagery has traditionally been considered a conscious experience, but recent findings suggest it can occur unconsciously. People with aphantasia, who report no conscious imagery, often perform similarly to controls on imagery-requiring tasks, show imagery-based priming, and exhibit imagery-related neural activity in visual cortex. However, investigating unconscious imagery faces challenges: ensuring imagery is genuinely unconscious rather than unreported due to response biases, and clarifying how imagistic or indirect perceptual processing must be to qualify as imagery. This paper examines the evidence, argues it is less compelling than initially appears, and proposes a strategy for advancing research.
Consciousness and Cognition
April 1, 2025
Iraklis Pantazis, Marc Wittmann
5 citations
A crossover study with 34 participants found that 60 minutes of Floatation-REST (floating in a dark, quiet tank of thermoneutral salt water) produced significantly weaker body boundaries, greater time distortion, and more relaxation compared to Bed-REST. After floating, participants reported a stronger afterglow, more state mindfulness, and greater interoceptive awareness. Relaxation during floating fully explained the afterglow effect in a mediation analysis. These results align with psychedelic research, suggesting Floatation-REST can elicit similar afterglow experiences.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2024
Benjamin Kozuch
5 citations
A new method for evaluating theories of consciousness uses evidence from complementary domains: neuroscientific evidence to judge philosophical theories and vice versa. The approach works when a neuroscientific and a philosophical theory are conceptually linked, so evidence confirming or disconfirming one can apply to the other. Applying this method to leading theories—including first- and second-order representationalism and theories emphasizing the prefrontal cortex's role—yields conclusions about their relative support. The method aims to improve how evidence is brought to bear on theories across disciplines.
Consciousness and Cognition
July 8, 2024
Veena Kumari, Umisha Tailor, A. Saifullah et al.
5 citations
Startle modulation, specifically habituation and prepulse inhibition (PPI), reflects early sensory processing in the brain. In a comparison of regular meditators (32 individuals) and meditation-naïve individuals (36 individuals), no significant group differences emerged in either habituation or PPI. However, among meditators, those who reported being able to sustain non-dual awareness during practice (18 individuals) showed significantly greater PPI than those who could not (14 individuals). These results suggest that subjective differences in meditation experience may relate to distinct sensory processing characteristics.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2022
Moo-Rung Loo, Shih-Kuen Cheng
5 citations
People who frequently have lucid dreams—awareness of being in a dream—tend to be better at telling the difference between memories of real events and memories of imagined events. In one experiment with 31 college students, higher dream lucidity correlated with better performance on a reality monitoring test. A second experiment with 109 participants found that those with more lucid dreams showed smaller differences in sensory details between memories of perceived and imagined events. These results suggest that frequent lucid dreamers have a superior ability to distinguish external from internal experiences, which may help protect against reality monitoring errors.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2022
Sepehrdad Rahimian
5 citations
The author argues that leading theories of consciousness fail to explain subjective experience because they rest on mistaken assumptions, creating a conflict between standard scientific methods and folk psychological notions. This cognitive dissonance blocks progress. Illusionism—the view that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion—is presented as the only viable framework for a scientific study of consciousness. Even if alternatives like panpsychism eventually prove correct, the author contends that the route to them must pass through Illusionism first.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2021
Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup, Peter Fazekas
5 citations
A new inference to the best explanation (IBE) process is proposed for comparing theories of consciousness based on empirical support. The process has four steps: Assimilate, Compile, Validate, and Compare. Most work so far has focused on assimilation. To demonstrate feasibility, the authors compile a complete collection of empirical evidence for the distinction between access consciousness (A-Consciousness) and phenomenal consciousness (P-Consciousness) and the overflow hypothesis. They also validate the interpretation of aphantasics' performance on retro-cue paradigms, which has been used to support the overflow hypothesis. This compilation is the first step toward enabling side-by-side comparisons of theories and the empirical phenomena they explain.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2020
Eyal Alef Ophir, Guido Hesselmann, Dominique Lamy
5 citations
The attentional blink is a limitation in perceiving two events close in time. Three experiments disentangled the roles of spatial attention, conscious perception, and working memory in causing this blink. Allocating spatial attention to the first target (T1) was neither necessary nor sufficient for eliciting a blink, but consciously perceiving T1 was necessary yet not sufficient. When T1 was task irrelevant, conscious perception triggered a blink only when T1 matched the attentional set for the second target (T2). The authors conclude that consciously perceiving a task-relevant event causes the blink, possibly because it triggers encoding into working memory, with implications for the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
May 1, 2025
Ishan Singhal, Nisheeth Srivastava
4 citations
Mental imagery unfolds at distinct timescales, with imagined contents being sluggish but more stable than visual perception. A large cohort (N = 827) completed six tasks recreating aspects of their imagination, revealing that temporal features of imagination can be accounted for by two factors: temporal ability and stability of mental imagery. Both imagination and perception share a common constraint: maintaining identically sized temporal windows of conscious experience.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2024
Karen R Konkoly, Nathan W Whitmore, Remington Mallett et al.
4 citations
A smartphone-based procedure called Targeted Lucidity Reactivation (TLR) can increase lucid dreaming without requiring laboratory equipment. In two experiments, participants reported more lucid dreams when they received sounds during REM sleep that they had heard during pre-sleep training, compared to a prior week without TLR or to blinded control procedures on alternate nights. The findings indicate that the sounds strengthen a link formed during training between the cues and a mindset of carefully analyzing one's current experience, which carries into dreams and boosts lucidity.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 8, 2024
Ville Loukola, Jarno Tuominen, Santeri Kirsilä et al.
4 citations
During the COVID-19 pandemic, dreams did not become more threatening or nightmarish overall compared to before the pandemic. Analysis of 1,132 pandemic-era dreams and 166 pre-pandemic dreams found no differences in the number of threatening events, disease-related threats, or severity of threats between the two periods. However, the minority of dreams that directly referenced the pandemic did contain more threats, disease-related threats, and severe threats. The findings suggest the pandemic's impact on dream content was limited to a subset of dreams rather than causing a general increase in threatening dream content.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2021
Camilo Miguel Signorelli, Quanlong Wang, Bob Coecke
4 citations
A mathematical framework using the graphical calculus of process theories (symmetric monoidal categories with Frobenius algebras) provides an ontologically neutral language to model aspects of consciousness. A toy example demonstrates how this axiomatic approach recovers features of conscious experience, including the distinction between external and internal subjective perspectives, the privacy or unreadability of personal subjective experience, and phenomenal unity—a key challenge for scientific studies of consciousness. These features emerge naturally from the compositional structure of the calculus.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2021
Piotr Szymanek
4 citations
The common view holds that a lucid dream begins when the dreamer realizes they are dreaming. This article argues that such realization can result from actual reasoning, not a mere epiphenomenon. It builds a Bayesian model of probabilistic reasoning that explains how a dreamer transitions to lucidity, considering their beliefs about what is generally probable or improbable and their openness to being in a dream. The model is defended against objections and offers an account of lucid dream initiation relevant for future research on dreaming.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 6, 2020
Dylan Black
3 citations
Peter Carruthers claims that the global workspace theory of consciousness leaves no facts about animal consciousness, and this problem extends to other cognitive theories, threatening the entire field. However, this argument also eliminates facts about human consciousness. The key flawed assumption is that scientific theories must explain away the explanatory gap. An alternative strategy is proposed: introspectable inferential connections from phenomenal concepts to functional concepts allow scientists to identify the global workspace through shared capacities in animals and humans, better reflecting actual scientific practice.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2025
Dylan Ludwig
2 citations
A novel working hypothesis proposes that conscious experiences enable a variety of functional capacities that differ across psychological tasks, individuals, and species—a view called functional pluralism. Examining emotional processing, the paper consolidates evidence from vision science experiments (masking and suppression of emotional stimuli) and clinical research on Generalized Anxiety Disorder to compare unconscious and conscious emotional processes. Conscious experiences are argued to facilitate emotion-specific functions, including enhanced representation of fine-grained evaluative information, inhibition, and flexible responses, contrary to leading theories of consciousness that assume a single function.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2023
Burak Erdeniz, Ege Tekgün, Bigna Lenggenhager et al.
2 citations
Most people experience dreams from a first-person perspective (82%) rather than a third-person perspective (18%). Regardless of perspective, dreamers typically perceive other dream characters within close peripersonal space—either 0–90 cm or 90–180 cm—rather than farther away (180–270 cm). Dream characters are most often seen from eye level (0° viewing angle) rather than above or below. The intensity of bodily self-consciousness in dreams is higher among those who habitually see other characters closer to their dream self. These findings provide a phenomenological account of spatial representation and felt presence of others in dreams, suggesting that peripersonal space coding and self-other distinction operate similarly in dreaming and waking states.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 28, 2025
Jei-Yi Lu, Chih-Chieh Chang, Tzu-Ling Chang et al.
1 citation
Buddhist meditation practitioners show greater mental flexibility, measured by a new alpha brainwave transformation index, compared to nonpractitioners. Twenty-eight practitioners and 28 nonpractitioners completed an EEG neurofeedback task requiring them to voluntarily control the appearance and disappearance of a signal based on their alpha brainwave state. Practitioners had a significantly higher alpha transformation index, indicating better ability to switch between mental states, along with higher self-esteem, life satisfaction, and lower negative affect, after controlling for age and gender. The alpha transformation index also correlated positively with mindfulness levels and life satisfaction, suggesting mindfulness may enhance neural efficiency and mental flexibility.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2025
Keelan R Gorman, Aimee Wrightson-Hester, Michael Landman et al.
1 citation
A virtual reality (VR) environment where the angle of view changes with information complexity was tested with ten university students. The approach was feasible, and participants' first-person experiences, analyzed thematically, aligned most with Mansell's (2024) control theory perspective, and to a lesser degree with Integrated Information Theory and Global Workspace Theory. The findings suggest that VR can provide a dynamic and ecologically valid method for gathering evidence about theories of consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2024
Yangyang Sun, Keshuo Wang, Xingjie Liang et al.
1 citation
Temporal attention—prioritizing information based on timing—can occur without conscious awareness. Using a temporal cueing paradigm with masking, visible and invisible cues both triggered temporal attention, though visible cues produced stronger effects. EEG recordings showed that both cue types evoked the contingent negative variation (CNV) component, with smaller amplitudes for invisible cues; the P300 component followed a similar pattern. Hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling indicated that both conscious and unconscious temporal attention involve non-perceptual decision-making processes. These findings both support and challenge the Global Workspace Theory: consciousness enhances attention through global broadcasting, whereas unconscious attention may rely on more localized neural networks.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2024
Franz Roman Schmid, Moritz F Kriegleder
1 citation
Predictive processing models, often proposed as a unified theory of perception, action, and cognition, fall short when applied to specific phenomena like hallucinations. Using Charles-Bonnet Syndrome as a case study, the authors argue that the current predictive processing account—specifically the strong prior hypothesis—fails to capture essential characteristics of stimulus-independent perception. This omission has critical phenomenological implications. To address the explanatory gap, the authors propose incorporating reality monitoring into the strong prior hypothesis, enabling it to account for nonveridical perceptual experiences beyond just veridical percepts.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2023
Charlene L M Lam, Tom J Barry, Jenny Yiend et al.
1 citation
Extinction learning, a process central to exposure therapy, may work differently when a feared stimulus is perceived without conscious awareness. In a threat conditioning experiment, healthy participants' pupils dilated more during extinction trials when they were unaware of the conditioned stimulus than when they were aware of it, with a moderate effect size. After fear was reinstated, recovery of fear was greater for the stimulus that had been suppressed from awareness during extinction. The findings suggest that extinction with reduced visual awareness weakens the modulation of fear responses compared to extinction with full perceptual awareness.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2014
Richard J. Stevenson, Mehmet Mahmut
1 citation
Visual experience contains more information than can later be recalled, and this study tested whether the same distinction exists for smell. In two experiments, participants rated odor features (e.g., how banana-like) both while smelling and after the odor was removed. On some trials the ratings matched; on others they differed. Each odor was presented twice: for half the odors both trials were identical, for the rest one trial differed. The after-smelling rating was always the same for each odor, allowing reliability to be measured. Incongruent profiles were least reliable. Attempting to access specific odor features after the odor is gone is harder if those features were not attended during smelling, suggesting more information is available during smelling than can be accessed afterward.