Formal thought disorder (FTD), a hallmark of schizophrenia spectrum disorders, manifests as incoherent speech and poses challenges for clinical assessment. Traditional clinical rating scales, though validated, are resource-intensive and lack scalability. Automated speech recognition (ASR) allows for objective quantification of linguistic and temporal features of speech, offering scalable...
NeuropsychologiaJuly 23, 2026Andreea Zaman, Ruby Morton, Paige Seath et al.
Remembering personal events typically involves reconstructing our original first-person perspective, often accompanied by a vivid sense of re-experiencing the past. The Angular Gyrus (AnG) has been implicated in both perspective reconstruction and subjective memory experience, yet its specific contribution remains unclear. We investigated the role of the AnG across three studies using a...
The human nose occupies approximately ten to fifteen percent of each monocular visual field, yet remains completely absent from conscious awareness during normal binocular vision-a phenomenon that reveals fundamental principles about how the brain constructs perceptual reality. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying nasal suppression through multiple theoretical lenses, integrating...
A central feature of consciousness is the association between external events and subjective experiences of content. These experiences range from low level (detection) to high level (identification). For example, a visual experience may range from seeing something on a computer screen (detection) to seeing the digit 3 (identification). In research, neural processes that correlate with these...
Whereas aphantasics report lacking voluntary conscious visual imagery, empirical findings indicate that they employ visual strategies to complete tasks. The discrepancy has led some researchers to propose that aphantasics rely on unconscious visual imagery. This paper instead motivates and defends a "conscious" view. Consciousness research uses both visibility and confidence measures....
NeuropsychologiaOctober 30, 2025Sandrine Baselgia, Björn Rasch1 citation
Psychosocial stress induces stress responses at physiological and cognitive levels which disrupt subsequent sleep. A recent study from our group has shown that stress-induced changes are dynamic: stress before sleep led to prolonged sleep latency and changes in the early sleep period, while anticipated post-sleep stress resulted in changes in the late sleep period. A possible explanation is...
Dreams may partially reflect the memory reorganizing that occurs nightly, improving the usefulness of what we learn each day. However, solid evidence has yet to link dreaming with adaptive overnight memory reorganization. Establishing this link faces several challenges, including the difficulty of experimentally controlling dream content and the susceptibility of dream reports to distortion and...
NeuropsychologiaOctober 3, 2025Guanghui Zhai, Yang Feng, Xin Ling et al.
Human attention is a limited resource increasingly taxed by continuous, socially embedded media streams, but how habitual short-video use shapes core attentional operations and their neural substrates remains unclear. Here we distinguish active from passive short video usage and examine whether they differentially relate to the alerting, orienting, and executive components of attention and to...
Neuroaesthetics is a subdiscipline within cognitive neuroscience which describes the biological mechanisms of aesthetic experiences. These experiences encompass perceptions and evaluations of natural objects, artwork, and environments that are ubiquitous in daily life. Empirical research demonstrates that aesthetic experiences arise from an interplay of sensory, affective, and semantic...
NeuropsychologiaJune 19, 2025Sam Fisher-Hicks, Victoria Lovett, Rodger Ll Wood et al.
Mesial frontal and temporoparietal brain areas differ in activity between high and low dream recallers, and lesion studies have found cessation of dreaming in patients with damage to these areas. This study extends these findings by assessing the relationship of dream cessation, and dream and nightmare frequencies, to severity of injury in patients at a head trauma clinic. 52 participants (M =...
NeuropsychologiaMay 3, 2025Matthew Kolisnyk, Geoffrey Laforge, Marie-Ève Gagnon et al.
Functional neuroimaging has fundamentally changed our understanding of disorders of consciousness (DoC). While many DoC patients exhibit minimal to no behavioural responsiveness, a significant minority show neural evidence of awareness and preserved cognitive functioning. Although several cognitive functions have been explored in DoC patients, autobiographical memory -- the ability to form and...
Depressive disorders have been consistently associated with elevated levels of mind-wandering and self-focused negative rumination. Separate tracks of research have implicated brain structures within the default mode network (DMN) in both mind-wandering and depression. In this study, we hypothesized that diminished mind-wandering and fewer depressive symptoms would co-occur in individuals with...
Using a creative production task, jazz improvisation, we tested alternative hypotheses about the flow experience: (A) that it is a state of domain-specific processing optimized by experience and characterized by minimal interference from task-negative default-mode network (DMN) activity versus (B) that it recruits domain-general task-positive DMN activity supervised by the fronto-parietal...
Conscious emotions drive all we do, except for automatic tasks like breathing. Specifically, they enable the operation of incentives-like hunger for eating-that motivate us to perform tasks that are vital to our lives. Indeed, we act because we want to act, and desire is an emotion. Next, we want to act because we expect the action to lead to some positive emotion such as pleasure, enjoyment,...
Mindfulness meditation is a contemplative practice informed by Buddhism that targets the development of present-focused awareness and non-judgment of experience. Interest in mindfulness is burgeoning, and it has been shown to be effective in improving mental and physical health in clinical and non-clinical contexts. In this report, for the first time, we used electroencephalography (EEG)...
Inspired by the pioneering work of Eran Zaidel beginning in the early 1970's on the role of the two cerebral hemispheres of the human brain in self-related cognition, we review research on self-face recognition from a laterality perspective. The self-face is an important proxy of the self, and self-face recognition has been used as an indicator of self-awareness more broadly. Over the last half...
NeuropsychologiaApril 15, 2023Bo Sun, Xianqing Zeng, Xiaomin Chen et al.
There is a theoretical debate between the early and late neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). Previous studies using neutral face stimuli supported an early NCC and suggested that visual awareness negativity (VAN) is associated with consciousness, while late positivity (LP) reflects post-perceptual activity. However, emotional faces may help to examine the relationship between LP and...
Older adults make fewer utilitarian decisions than younger adults during sacrificial moral dilemmas, which are associated with age-related reductions in Default Mode Network resting-state functional connectivity. Decreases on tasks associated with fluid cognitive abilities, such as working memory capacity, are also associated with age-related Default Mode Network changes. Regions within this...
The chief undertaking in the studies of consciousness is that of unravelling the neural correlates of consciousness. To this day, this crusade remains at an impasse, with a clash of two main theoretical stances: the Global Neuronal Workspace and the Recurrent Processing. Yet, cellular and neurophysiological studies of consciousness have been mostly dissociated from the two. Herein, a...
NeuropsychologiaNovember 1, 2021Nicola Sambuco, M. Bradley, P. Lang
The default mode network (DMN) is activated when constructing and imagining narrative events, with functional brain activity in one region, the medial-prefrontal cortex, hypothesized to be modulated during emotional processing by adding value (or pleasure) to the episodic representation. However, since enhanced reactivity during emotional, compared to neutral, content is a more frequent finding...
In a recent series of experiments, Pinto and colleagues found that the split-brain patient D.D.C. was able to respond accurately to stimuli in either visual field, whether using his right hand, his left hand, or verbally. Pinto and colleagues argue that this demonstrates that a split-brain patient remains a unitary agent and thus continues to possess a unified consciousness. This paper provides...
The P3 event-related potential has been known for over 50 years, but its function is still a matter of ongoing debate. Current theories interpret P3b either as a correlate of perceptual consciousness, or as reflecting cognitive processes, like working memory and executive functions. Unexpectedly, recent studies indicate that P3b might occur in response to unconsciously presented stimuli which,...
One of Endel Tulving's most important contributions to memory research is the coupling of self-knowing consciousness (or "autonoesis") with episodic memory. According to Tulving, autonoetic episodic memory enables the uniquely human neurocognitive operation of "mental time travel", which is the ability to deliberately "project" oneself to a specific time and place to remember personally...
NeuropsychologiaAugust 1, 2019Umberto León-Domínguez, José León-Carrión
The Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) is one of the principal brain regions studied in consciousness. Previous investigations suggest that the PFC is an important neural hub in both awareness and the manipulation of the content of consciousness. Despite a consensus in the scientific community regarding PFC function in cortico-cortical networks, there is still intense debate as to its role in the...
We are conscious and verbally report some of the information reaching our senses, although a big amount of information is processed unconsciously. There is no agreement about the neural correlates of consciousness, with low-level theories proposing that neural processing on primary sensory brain regions is the most important neural correlate of consciousness, while high-level theories propose...