Communications Psychology
May 21, 2025
Nicolás Sánchez-Fuenzalida, Simon van Gaal, Stephen M Fleming et al.
3 citations
Confidence reports during perceptual decision-making do not uniquely reflect subjective experience. Across two experiments with 204 participants and three bias manipulations, non-perceptual factors such as changes in stimulus base rates or asymmetric payoff matrices leaked into confidence judgments. This shows that confidence can be influenced by response biases unrelated to actual perception, complicating its use as a pure measure of subjective experience. The relative strength of biases in first-order choices versus confidence may help distinguish whether a manipulation truly alters perception or only affects decision strategy.
Communications Psychology
June 9, 2026
Daphne Rimsky Robert, Matteo Lisi, Kévin Nguy et al.
Conscious perception of a word's meaning can occur even when its visual features are inaccessible. In an experiment, participants viewed briefly flashed, visually masked words. When a semantically related spoken word followed, they could better detect and identify the previous word but could not report its letter casing or screen position. This suggests that a semantic representation can reach awareness via retro-cueing after sensory details are masked, supporting theories that conscious access relies on a secondary broadcasting process largely independent of early sensory buildup.
Communications Psychology
May 8, 2026
Ronald Fischer, Giovanna Bortolini, Tiago Bortolini et al.
Nonordinary experiences (NOEs) such as déjà vu, intense compassion, and out-of-body sensations are common in the general population, but how researchers ask about them greatly affects reported prevalence. A mental health framing and yes/no response options both lower prevalence rates, while item clarity raises them. Across six studies totaling over 37,000 participants, déjà vu and unusually intense experiences of compassion and love were most prevalent (over 70%), while perceptions of animated objects, devotion to objects or individuals, out-of-body experiences, and seeing lights were rarer (over 13%). Despite framing and response-format effects, relative lifetime prevalence can be estimated consistently. The findings provide a validated tool for systematically identifying these experiences to study consciousness in real-world contexts.
Communications Psychology
April 28, 2026
Valentina Elce, Giorgia Bontempi, Serena Scarpelli et al.
Dreams are universal yet highly personal. By analyzing 3,366 reports of dreams and waking experiences from 207 adults collected between 2020 and 2024, along with demographic, cognitive, psychometric, and sleep measures, researchers found that dreams differ from waking thoughts: they are less self-referential and thought-centered, and more perceptual, dominated by visuo-spatial details, multiple characters, and bizarre events. Stable traits like attitude toward dreaming, mind-wandering propensity, and subjective sleep quality selectively influenced dream content. During the first 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, dreams from an independent dataset of 80 participants showed increased references to limitations and heightened emotional intensity, which gradually normalized over subsequent years. Stable individual traits and incidental experiences jointly shape dream semantics.
Communications Psychology
September 21, 2023
Antonia Eisenkoeck
A sound detection and discrimination paradigm provides evidence for phenomenal consciousness without knowledge thereof.
Communications Psychology
June 4, 2026
June-Kyo Kim, Joshua Koh, Charan Ranganath et al.
People who experience the same event often remember it differently. This study examined whether similarity in what people recall is reflected in shared brain activity patterns. Twenty-four participants watched and later recounted two cartoon movies while undergoing fMRI. Verbal recall was analyzed with topic modeling to measure content similarity across individuals. Greater similarity in recalled content was associated with stronger shared activation patterns in the Default Mode Network (DMN) during both encoding and retrieval, particularly in posterior medial, medial prefrontal, and anterior temporal cortices. The findings suggest that natural language processing tools can link memory content to brain activity and that the DMN supports encoding, interpreting, and recalling complex events.
Communications Psychology
November 26, 2025
Morten Overgaard, Peter Fazekas, Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup et al.
The field of consciousness research lacks consensus due to reliance on competing grand theories. A more productive path forward would shift focus toward construct-based, data-driven, and iterative approaches that identify empirical building blocks of conscious experience, enabling cumulative and integrative progress.
Communications Psychology
September 29, 2025
John P Veillette, Yimeng Cheng, Aditi Joshi et al.
The sense of agency—the feeling that we control our own actions—may require conscious awareness of the outcomes of those actions. In an experiment testing whether intentional binding (a measure of agency in which an action's perceived time shifts toward its sensory outcome) occurs when the outcome is masked from awareness, the effect was not only absent but reversed: participants perceived their action as farther from the unconsciously perceived consequence. This suggests that ordinary sensorimotor processing depends on conscious awareness.
Communications Psychology
February 18, 2025
Valentina Elce, Damiana Bergamo, Giorgia Bontempi et al.
Dream recall varies widely between people and across nights. In 217 healthy adults aged 18 to 70, attitude toward dreaming, tendency to mind-wander, and sleep patterns were associated with whether a person reported a dream upon waking. The likelihood of recalling dream content was predicted by age and vulnerability to interference. Night-to-night changes in sleep patterns and seasonal fluctuations also influenced dream recall. These findings help explain why some people remember dreams more often than others and why recall varies within the same person.
Communications Psychology
July 18, 2024
Oliver Durcan, Peter Holland, Joydeep Bhattacharya
The flow state, a concept originally observed in experts absorbed in intrinsically rewarding activities, is now frequently studied in neurophysiology using constrained, unfamiliar tasks. This perspective article proposes an activity-autonomy framework with testable hypotheses to induce flow, expanding beyond the traditional challenge-skill balance. It reviews and synthesizes best methodological practices from neurophysiological flow studies into a 24-item checklist. The checklist provides guidelines for consistent reporting, personalizing and testing isolated challenge types, accounting for participant skills, motivation, and individual differences, and processing self-report data. The authors argue for a cohesive approach to capture a consistent representation of flow states in neurophysiological research.