Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2009
Vincent De Gardelle, Jérôme Sackur, Sid Kouider
People often believe they see more than they can report, such as all letters in a briefly flashed array. This study tested whether that feeling reflects genuine rich conscious experience or an illusion. Using a partial-report task with unexpected pseudo-letters in unreported areas, participants still perceived only letters, even though pseudo-letters were present. The results suggest the feeling of seeing arises from an illusion: the brain reconstructs letters from partial information and prior expectations, rather than from access to a rich phenomenal experience. This supports the view that the subjective richness of perception is not a direct reflection of conscious content but a constructive process.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 1998
T C Dalton
A local neural network model for phenomenal experience explains the persistence, latency, and seamlessness of consciousness and its unity, but fails to account for nonlinear interactions between local and global neural systems. The model's assumptions that experience is immediate, intrinsic, and incorrigible limit understanding of how consciousness changes during neurobehavioral development. Recent evidence indicates development is discontinuous and that judgment arises under uncertainty, aligning feeling and perception with energy and behavior. A developmental approach may resolve the paradox of feeling both infinitely close to and distant from oneself.
Consciousness and Cognition
July 20, 2026
Marina Trakas, Ryan Daley
A stronger sense of self-continuity between dreaming and waking life is linked to positive dream emotions carrying over into waking life, and to a weaker experience of having a body distinct from one's waking body. More frequent experiences of being another person in dreams are associated with more frequent emotions felt as inappropriate to the dream context. No significant links were found between being another person in dreams and lucid dreaming, observer perspectives, or dream recall frequency. The findings point to connections between self-continuity and bodily and affective aspects of dreaming.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 5, 2026
Iris Berent
People's intuitions about whether consciousness is physical or non-physical shift depending on how the question is framed, similar to a visual illusion. In two experiments, when asked about a scenario where a person's body is duplicated, most people said the copy would not share the original's conscious states, reflecting a dualist view. But when asked about Mary, a neuroscientist who learns color for the first time, people expected her new color experience to appear on a brain scan, reflecting a physicalist view. This inconsistency is traced to two cognitive biases—intuitive Dualism and Essentialism—suggesting that such intuitions are unreliable guides to the nature of consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2026
Ivonne A Castiblanco Jimenez, Tommaso Ciorli, Martina Froio et al.
Dynamic laughter expressions overcome visual suppression more readily than crying or neutral expressions, especially at the threshold between minimal awareness and conscious perception. In two experiments using Continuous Flash Suppression, participants viewed dynamic facial stimuli and reported category and subjective visibility. Laughter was more likely than crying to break through suppression, with discrimination performance increasing at intermediate awareness levels. When neutral expressions were included, a graded pattern emerged: neutral expressions were suppressed most strongly, crying showed intermediate resistance, and laughter showed the weakest suppression. These results indicate that socially relevant emotional signals differ in their thresholds for conscious access, with laughter prioritized when perceptual awareness is limited.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2026
Mika Koivisto
A partial flow state, termed microflow, occurs during creative idea generation but does not meet all criteria for full flow. Smooth performance was linked to more ideas but less creativity, particularly when conventional associations had to be suppressed. Immersion was positively associated with creativity and semantic distance, suggesting deep attentional engagement facilitates access to remote associations. The spontaneous flow of associations predicted originality independently of flow. The results indicate a trade-off between the quantity and quality of creative outputs depending on the relative intensity of smooth and immersive components.
Consciousness and Cognition
May 1, 2026
Joseph Glicksohn
Converging operations aim to triangulate a construct such as altered states of consciousness or impulsivity, but measures sometimes diverge rather than converge. Three examples are examined: trait and state impulsivity may not correlate; state absorption may not correlate with trait absorption; and trait mindfulness may fail to correlate negatively with trait impulsivity due to ambiguous questionnaire wording. The author argues that the defining measure for impulsivity should be self-reported trait impulsivity, and for an altered state of consciousness it should be the subjective experience report. Three future research directions are proposed: determining which measure defines a construct, clarifying mismatches between measures, and considering demand characteristics that may cloud interpretation.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2026
Kyle Napierkowski, Emily Cook
People with synesthesia, a condition where sensory experiences blend (e.g., seeing colors for sounds), report dreams with distinct thematic content compared to those without synesthesia. Analyzing 2,337 dream reports from Reddit (1,169 from self-identified synesthetes and 1,168 matched controls), researchers used language models to detect group differences. Four themes—digital, interpersonal regret, diverse worlds, and violent conflict—were significantly more common in synesthete dreams. These findings suggest that synesthesia reflects broader differences in cognitive organization that persist during dreaming, supporting the idea that dreaming is continuous with waking thought and that stable traits shape spontaneous mental experiences.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2026
Yoav Schweitzer, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Yair Dor-Ziderman et al.
During deep meditation, the usual boundary between self and world blurs, and people report a reduced sense of controlling their actions. The brain normally dampens its response to self-initiated sensations, a marker of agency called sensory suppression. In a preregistered study, 46 experienced meditators performed a button-pressing task during MEG scanning. Self-reports showed partial attainment of deep meditative states. At the group level, dissolution states did not significantly alter sensory suppression, but individuals who reported deeper meditation showed stronger sensory suppression. This suggests that variation in meditation depth may obscure group-level effects, highlighting a complex relationship between meditation depth, sense of agency, and sensory processing.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2026
Mingyuan Wang, Yunfei Guo
Mindfulness meditation improves time-based prospective memory (TBPM)—remembering to do something at a specific future time—by enhancing attentional resources, but this benefit depends on how much people can monitor the passage of time. In an experiment with 95 undergraduate volunteers, participants who practiced mindfulness meditation showed better TBPM accuracy than a control group, but only when time-monitoring was restricted. When sufficient monitoring was possible, the advantage disappeared. The findings suggest that mindfulness meditation boosts TBPM specifically by improving attention under conditions where time cues are limited.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2025
Moo-Rung Loo, Shih-Kuen Cheng
People who frequently experience lucid dreams tend to be better at distinguishing memories of imagined events from memories of real events. In a study of 41 participants completing a source memory task with EEG recording, those with higher trait lucidity showed greater accuracy, especially for externally perceived items. Brain activity patterns—stronger left parietal old/new effects for imagined items and greater frontal gamma-band power for perceived items—correlated with both lucidity and source accuracy. Theta-band activity also predicted source accuracy. These results suggest that high-lucidity individuals use recollection and familiarity processes to enhance subjective specificity, enabling more precise discrimination between imagined and perceived experiences.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2025
Charlotte Van den Driessche, Clotilde Chappé, Mahiko Konishi et al.
The stream of thought can be partitioned into five distinct mental states: focus, task-related interference, external distraction, daydream, and blank. This classification, called the Classification of Mental States (CoMS-5T), was tested for validity. Participants gave free verbal reports of their mental contents, which external raters then classified, supporting the construct validity and neutrality of the system. A reanalysis of a large dataset from Beikmohamadi and Meier (2022) found distinct behavioral signatures for four of the five states, providing criterion validity. The work offers a systematic way to describe and measure the ongoing stream of thought in cognitive psychology.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2025
Antonino Greco, Clara Rastelli, Andrea Ubaldi et al.
Exposure to simulated psychedelic hallucinations in virtual reality increased cognitive flexibility, as shown by reduced task-switching costs, compared to naturalistic VR exposure. No significant differences were found in linguistic automatic association tasks at word or sentence levels. Visually grounded high-level cognitive processes were modulated by the simulated hallucinations. The findings offer insights into bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes in altered states of consciousness without drugs, potentially informing neuroscience and clinical applications.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2024
Benjamin Rebouillat, Nicolas Barascud, Sid Kouider
People often feel they have conscious control over their decisions, but whether they can actually access the content of a decision before acting on it is unclear. In an experiment where participants freely chose between two options but sometimes had to reject their decision just before execution, neural signals tracked during early deliberation revealed that the initially preferred option predicted the upcoming choice, yet this content remained mostly outside conscious awareness. Participants frequently showed overconfidence in their ability to access this content, and confidence was linked to a neural marker of self-initiated decision, suggesting a qualitative confusion in evaluating one's own decision process. These findings challenge the idea of complete agency over choices and indicate inflated awareness of forthcoming decisions.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2024
John P Veillette, Letitia Ho, Howard C Nusbaum
People's explicit beliefs about being an agent are not directly tied to how often they feel a sense of agency during sensorimotor tasks. Instead, the connection runs through metacognition: individuals who are less sensitive to cues indicating self-causation tend to report more negative agency beliefs, but this relationship disappears when accounting for their ability to accurately monitor their own judgments. Positive agency beliefs showed no clear link to sensorimotor measures. The findings suggest that introspective access, rather than the raw experience of agency, shapes one's enduring beliefs about being an agent.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2024
Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup, Jakob Stenseke, Morten Overgaard
The Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) model, proposed by Manuel and Lenore Blum, aims to define consciousness, address the hard problem of consciousness, and show the value of theoretical computer science for studying it. This evaluation examines CTM's explanatory power across philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience, and computation. The authors conclude that claims of CTM constituting progress are currently premature, though the model has potential. Several avenues for future research are suggested to develop the model further.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2024
Piotr Szymanek, Marek Homan, Michiel van Elk et al.
Hearing voices is not limited to psychotic disorders but also occurs in the general population, often as perceptions of supernatural beings. In a preregistered experiment, participants completed a signal detection task where expectations about the number of voices present influenced their response bias: expecting fewer voices led to a more conservative strategy, while expecting more led to a more liberal one. Adding sensory noise amplified these effects. The findings indicate that voice detection relies on expectations, especially when sensory data are unreliable, shedding light on predictive processes underlying voice-hearing experiences.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 19, 2024
Dmitri Filimonov, Sampo Tanskanen, Antti Revonsuo et al.
The level-of-processing (LoP) hypothesis, which describes how awareness of visual stimuli can be either gradual or all-or-none depending on feature depth, was tested in hearing for the first time. Participants heard words from different categories spoken in different pitches near the perceptual threshold. Results indicate that LoP also applies to the auditory modality. The auditory awareness negativity (AAN) was an early correlate of awareness independent of LoP, while late positivity (LP) was modulated by awareness, performance accuracy, and level of processing.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 28, 2024
Johannes Kleiner
A structural turn is emerging across consciousness studies, replacing verbal descriptions of conscious experience with mathematical spaces and other structural tools. The author offers three essential comments to prevent early misunderstandings: metaphysical premises underlying structural approaches, the viability of structure-preserving mappings, and clarifying what a structure of conscious experience actually is. The piece also explains the great promises of structural methodologies and their potential impact on consciousness science.
Consciousness and Cognition
February 27, 2024
K. Evers, M. Farisco, C. Pennartz
The paper examines how diverse current theories of consciousness are and whether they share common ground. It argues that logical and empirical commensurability—the ability to compare theories along specific dimensions—is necessary for identifying shared features. Comparing a subset of neuroscience-based theories reveals no single unifying model; theories that appear similar on one dimension may differ on another. The authors propose using multiple probing questions to assess overall similarities and differences between theories. Despite conflicting background definitions of consciousness, they conclude that a shared methodological approach to studying brain-consciousness relationships could eventually allow different theories to be integrated and merged, overcoming the current fragmentation.
Consciousness and Cognition
January 1, 2024
Louise Dupraz, J. Bourgin, L. Pia et al.
Seeing an embodied humanoid avatar move its arms can make an observer feel as though their own static arms are moving, treating the avatar's kinematic signals like those from a biological body. Two experiments showed that the sense of body ownership over an avatar seen from a first-person perspective was closely linked to visuomotor synchrony. However, kinaesthetic illusions did not depend on this synchrony, indicating that the avatar is inevitably processed at the sensorimotor level as one's own body, whether consciously considered as such or not. The findings suggest that body ownership and kinaesthetic illusions may be underpinned by distinct representations: the body image and the body schema.
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2023
R. Watanabe, Y. Moriguchi
Young children aged 5–6 years and adults performed a figure discrimination task while reporting their subjective awareness of a target stimulus (square or diamond) presented at varying durations. Objective accuracy thresholds were larger for children than for adults. Subjective awareness thresholds were also larger for children when using a four-point scale but not a two-point scale. No age differences were found in the emergent process of consciousness, suggesting that the way consciousness arises is similar across ages, though children require longer stimulus exposure to reach the same level of awareness.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 28, 2023
G Pradeep Kumar, Kanishka Sharma, A Adarsh et al.
Long-term Brahmakumaris Rajyoga meditators practicing eyes-open meditation show increased functional connectivity in higher theta and alpha brainwave bands both within and across hemispheres, measured by pairwise phase consistency. Controls listening to music show no change in theta band. During baseline, meditators exhibit greater interhemispheric anterior-to-posterior integration in higher beta and slow gamma bands than controls. Increased integration between frontal electrodes in meditators suggests heightened self-awareness, while reduced occipital pairwise phase consistency relative to controls indicates modified visual processing from long-term eyes-open practice. These connectivity changes support the communication-through-coherence hypothesis and cortical integration theory during meditation-induced non-ordinary states.
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2023
Romain Ghibellini, Beat Meier
Hypnagogic states—vivid experiences during the transition from wakefulness to sleep—were reported by 80.2% of 4,456 participants in a questionnaire study, with higher prevalence in women than men. Kinaesthetic and visual experiences were most common, while auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory ones were less frequent. These states were less prevalent than dreams and showed distinct modality profiles, but matched dreams in emotional quality, irritation, and vividness. The findings indicate hypnagogic states are widespread and share key features with dreaming.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2023
Kayley L Zielinski-Nicolson, Natalie Roberts, Simon Boag
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is an altered state of consciousness involving changes in affect, relaxation, and tingling sensations. Online videos designed to trigger ASMR have become popular, and ASMR may improve sleep, emotion regulation, and relaxation, but understanding of ASMR propensity is limited. This study examined whether a mentally flexible cognitive style underlies the ability to experience ASMR. Among 376 undergraduate students, findings did not support an overall mentally flexible mindset. However, transliminality, emotional contagion susceptibility, positive schizotypal traits, and roleplaying ability all significantly positively predicted ASMR propensity. ASMR propensity represents several possible underlying cognitive styles related to enhanced imagination and perceptual ability, not simply mental flexibility.