Research published in Cortex - The Consciousness Library

The role of extra-striate areas in conscious motor behavior: a registered report with Fast-Optical Imaging

Cortex September 1, 2026 Elisabetta Colombari, Giorgia Parisi, Sonia Mele et al.

Disclosing the brain areas responsible for the emergence of visual awareness and their timing of activation represents one of the major challenges in consciousness research. In particular, isolating the neural processes strictly related to consciousness from concurrent neural dynamics, either related to prerequisites or post-perceptual processing, has long engaged consciousness research. In...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2026.09.001

Neural responses to sensorimotor conflict in an embodied agency task.

Cortex August 1, 2026 Reina Van der Goot, Amit Regev Krugwasser, Geffen Markusfeld et al.

The Sense of Agency (SoA), the subjective experience that 'I am in control of my actions', has been proposed to involve both early implicit sensorimotor processes (feeling of agency) and later explicit higher-level processes (judgment of agency). Even though SoA is fundamental to our interactions with the external world and to our construct of the self, its underlying neural mechanism remains...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2026.03.023 Full text Alpha oscillations Electroencephalography EEG Mvpa Sense of agency +3

Covert brain complexity in the intensive care unit.

Cortex August 1, 2026 Matteo Fecchio, David R Schreier, Morgan K Cambareri et al.

Early detection of consciousness in critically ill patients with severe brain injuries can profoundly impact prognostication and clinical care decisions. Advanced multimodal protocols to detect signs of consciousness include standardized behavioral assessments, task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and task-based electroencephalography (EEG). However, these approaches have...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2026.03.021 Full text Coma Consciousness Electroencephalography Intensive care unit +1

Frequency-tagging as a measure of conscious face perception.

Cortex June 1, 2026 Audrey Mazancieux, Axel Cleeremans, Adélaïde De Heering

Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) from frequency-tagging (FT) paradigms are widely used to investigate visual processing. Yet their association to conscious perception remains unclear. To test whether SSVEP occurs during conscious perception or without consciousness, 32 participants saw sequences of different images presented at 6 Hz (6 images per second) and containing faces every...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2026.03.014 Full text Consciousness Faces Frequency-tagging Metacognition +1

Situation model manipulations differently engage semantic and default mode networks during narrative comprehension.

Cortex April 19, 2026 Erica Adezati, Melissa Thye, Shubhangi Butta et al.

Narrative comprehension involves creating a mental representation of the events of the story: a "situation model". Maintaining a situation model is thought to be supported by the Default Mode Network (DMN), but recent work suggests that the semantic system, and specifically the ventrolateral anterior temporal lobe (ATL), may play a role in reflecting on and restructuring the situation model via...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2026.04.005 Default mode network Nerve net Humans Magnetic resonance imaging +11

The default mode network: A transmodal cortical system for enhancing cognition and sharing mental worlds in language-specific, culturally diverse ways.

Cortex February 14, 2026 David Kemmerer, Guy Dove

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a collection of interconnected transmodal cortical areas that was originally found to be engaged when people do not focus on external sensory stimuli but instead attend to their inner thoughts. More recent experiments have shown that it is also recruited during externally oriented tasks that require the processing of concepts, including the increasingly complex...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2026.02.008 Default mode network Cerebral cortex Nerve net Humans +7

The potential risks of opening the mind's eye with psychedelic therapies.

Cortex October 1, 2025 Roger Koenig-Robert, Rebecca Keogh, Joel Pearson 3 citations

Psychedelic therapy is on the rise, as its legalisation is ongoing in multiple countries. Here, we write a note of warning regarding recent reports that people with aphantasia (a blind mind's eye) have acquired visual mental imagery after using psychedelics. While the prospect of gaining, or indeed increasing, visual mental imagery is appealing to many, strong mental imagery has been associated...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2025.08.002 Full text Psychedelic therapy Aphantasia Mental health Mental imagery

Bodily perception links memory and self: A case study of an amnesic patient.

Cortex October 2025 Nathalie H Meyer, Mariana Babo-Rebelo, Jevita Potheegadoo et al.

Episodic autobiographical memory (EAM) is a building block of self-consciousness, involving recollection and subjective re-experiencing of personal past experiences. Any life episode is originally encoded by a subject within a body. This raises the possibility that memory encoding is shaped by bodily self-consciousness (BSC), a basic form of self-consciousness arising from the multisensory and...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2025.07.015 Full text Amnesia Bodily self-consciousness Episodic memory Hippocampal atrophy +2

Visual mental imagery in typical imagers and in aphantasia: A millimeter-scale 7-T fMRI study.

Cortex April 2025 Jianghao Liu, Minye Zhan, Dounia Hajhajate et al.

Most of us effortlessly describe visual objects, whether seen or remembered. Yet, around 4% of people report congenital aphantasia: they struggle to visualize objects despite being able to describe their visual appearance. What neural mechanisms create this disparity between subjective experience and objective performance? Aphantasia can provide novel insights into conscious processing and...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2025.01.013 Full text Aphantasia Consciousness Fusiform imagery node Visual mental imagery +1

Conscious perception of fear in faces: Insights from high-density EEG and perceptual awareness scale with threshold stimuli.

Cortex May 1, 2024 Antonio Maffei, Filippo Gambarota, Mario Liotti et al.

Contrary to the extensive research on processing subliminal and/or unattended emotional facial expressions, only a minority of studies have investigated the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) of emotions conveyed by faces. In the present high-density electroencephalography (EEG) study, we first employed a staircase procedure to identify each participant's perceptual threshold of the...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.02.010 Full text Electroencephalography Event-related potentials Faces Facial expressions +1

Feedforward connectivity patterns from visual areas to the front of the brain contain information about sensory stimuli regardless of awareness or report.

Cortex March 1, 2024 Elise G Rowe, Marta I. Garrido, Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Current theories of consciousness can be categorized to some extent by their predictions about the putative role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conscious perception. One family of the theories proposes that the PFC is necessary for conscious perception. The other postulates that the PFC is not necessary and that other areas (e.g., posterior cortical areas) are more important for conscious...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.11.016 Full text Awareness Classification Consciousness Decoding +3

Religion and the brain: Jordan Grafman's contributions to religion and brain research and the special case of religious language.

Cortex December 1, 2023 Patrick Mcnamara 5 citations

Grafman and colleagues' papers in religion and brain research have documented the extent to which religious beliefs and behaviors are mediated by standard social cognitive networks in brain. Grafman's work however also points beyond treatments of religious cognition as merely a species of more general social cognitive processes. Data emerging from experiments targeting mystical states as well...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.10.015 Full text Brain Mystical experiences Pragmatics Psychedelics +4

Probing the unimaginable: The impact of aphantasia on distinct domains of visual mental imagery and visual perception.

Cortex September 1, 2023 Jianghao Liu, Paolo Bartolomeo 68 citations

Different individuals experience varying degrees of vividness in their visual mental images. The distribution of these variations across different imagery domains, such as object shape, color, written words, faces, and spatial relationships, remains unknown. To address this issue, we conducted a study with 117 healthy participants who reported different levels of imagery vividness. Of these...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.06.003 Full text Aphantasia Phenomenal consciousness Visual mental imagery Visual perception

A network-level test of the role of the co-activated default mode network in episodic recall and social cognition.

Cortex August 2023 Rebecca L Jackson, Gina F. Humphreys, Grace E Rice et al.

Resting-state network research is extremely influential, yet the functions of many networks remain unknown. In part, this is due to typical (e.g., univariate) analyses independently testing the function of individual regions and not examining the full set of regions that form a network whilst co-activated. Connectivity is dynamic and the function of a region may change based on its current...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.12.016 Full text Default mode network Episodic memory Independent component analysis Resting-state networks +1

The self and the Bayesian brain: Testing probabilistic models of body ownership through a self-localization task

Cortex July 25, 2023 Tommaso Bertoni, Giulio Mastria, Nikita Akulenko et al. 23 citations

Simple multisensory manipulations can induce the illusory misattribution of external objects to one's own body, allowing to experimentally investigate body ownership. In this context, body ownership has been conceptualized as the result of the online Bayesian optimal estimation of the probability that one object belongs to the body from the congruence of multisensory inputs. This idea has been...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.06.019

High-density EEG power topography and connectivity during confusional arousal.

Cortex October 1, 2022 Anna Castelnovo, Julian Amacker, Massimo Maiolo et al. 26 citations

Confusional arousal is the milder expression of a family of disorders known as Disorders of Arousal (DOA) from non-REM sleep. These disorders are characterized by recurrent abnormal behaviors that occur in a state of reduced awareness for the external environment. Despite frequent amnesia for the nocturnal events, when actively probed, patients are able to report vivid hallucinatory/dream-like...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.05.021 Full text Disorders of arousal Nrem-sleep parasomnia Night terror Pavor nocturnus +1

The brain in flow: A systematic review on the neural basis of the flow state.

Cortex September 1, 2022 Clara Alameda, Daniel Sanabria, Luis F. Ciria 69 citations

Flow state is a subjective experience that people report when task performance is experienced as automatic, intrinsically rewarding, optimal and effortless. While this intriguing phenomenon is the subject of a plethora of behavioural studies, only recently researchers have started to look at its neural correlates. Here, we aim to systematically and critically review the existing literature on...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2022.06.005 Full text Phenomenology Cognitive processing Consciousness EEG +3

fMRI lag structure during waking up from early sleep stages.

Cortex September 1, 2021 Santiago Alcaide, Jacobo Sitt, Tomoyasu Horikawa et al. 13 citations

The brain mechanisms by which we transition from sleep to a conscious state remain largely unknown in humans, partly because of methodological challenges. Here we study a pre-existing dataset of waking up participants originally designed for a study of dreaming (Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, & Kamitani, 2013) and suggest that suddenly awakening from early sleep stages results from a two-stage...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2021.06.005 Full text Consciousness Waking up FMRI

Hide and seek: Directing top-down attention is not sufficient for accelerating conscious access.

Cortex 2020 Surya Gayet, Iris Douw, V. V. D. Burg et al.

At any moment in time, we have a single conscious visual experience representing a minute part of our visual world. As such, the visual input stimulating our retinae is in continuous competition for reaching conscious access. Many complex cognitive operations can only be applied to consciously accessible visual information, thereby raising the question whether humans have the ability to select...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.027

Rehabilitating the brain through meditation and electrical stimulation.

Cortex 2020 Michael I Posner

This paper is a review of our recent studies and ideas related to the neuropsychological issues that Robert Rafal and I worked together to understand attention and hopefully improve it in a variety of patients. Rehabilitation is also a goal of my current research to determine if non invasive stimuli can improve white matter in humans. We have found that fractional anisotropy (FA) is improved in...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.07.022 Full text

Neurofunctional correlates of body-ownership and sense of agency: A meta-analytical account of self-consciousness.

Cortex December 1, 2019 S. Seghezzi, Gianluigi Giannini, L. Zapparoli 95 citations

Self-consciousness consists of several dissociable experiences, including the sense of ownership of one's body and the sense of agency over one's action consequences. The relationship between body-ownership and the sense of agency has been described by different neurocognitive models, each providing specific neurofunctional predictions. According to an "additive" model, the sense of agency...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.08.018

Multisensory perceptual awareness: Categorical or graded?

Cortex November 1, 2019 Jean-Paul Noel, Nathan Faivre, Elisa Magosso et al. 6 citations

Neural evidence suggests that mechanisms associated with conscious access (i.e., the ability to report on a conscious state) are "all-or-none". Upon crossing some threshold, neural signals are globally broadcast throughout the brain and allow conscious reports. However, whether subjective experience (phenomenal consciousness) is categorical (i.e., transitioning abruptly from unconscious to...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.05.018 Full text Consciousness Global neuronal workspace Multisensory Neural networks +1

Binocular rivalry and emotion: Implications for neural correlates of consciousness and emotional biases in conscious perception.

Cortex November 1, 2019 María Hernández-Lorca, Kristian Sandberg, Dominique Kessel et al.

Studies of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) combining MEG/EEG with behavioral data have described two main time ranges relating to conscious perception: 130-320 (the visual awareness negativity; VAN) and 300-500 (P3a) ms after stimulus onset. At the same time, two event-related potential (ERP) peaks have shown an emotional modulation of endogenous attention: the early posterior...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.08.003 Full text Binocular rivalry Conscious perception Erp Emotion

Default Mode Network Dynamics in Covert Consciousness

Cortex January 30, 2019 Yelena G Bodien, Zachary D. Threlkeld, Brian L Edlow

Compared Notably, DMN properties were completely absent in Patient 4 (P4), who had a behavioral diagnosis of VS but demonstrated covert consciousness on a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) motor imagery task. A yellow outline of the brain indicates an intact DMN property, defined by a Z-value (for correlations and anticorrelations) and percent of suprathreshold voxels (for...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.01.014 Full text

The role of the basolateral amygdala in dreaming.

Cortex December 25, 2018 Yvonne Blake, David Terburg, Ross Balchin et al.

Neuroimaging studies have repeatedly shown amygdala activity during sleep (REM and NREM). Consequently, various theorists propose central roles for the amygdala in dreaming - particularly in the generation of dream affects, which seem to play a major role in dream plots. However, a causal role for the amygdala in dream phenomena has never been demonstrated. The traditional first step in...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2018.12.016 Full text Dreaming Humans Brain diseases Calcinosis +8

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