Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior

Neural responses to sensorimotor conflict in an embodied agency task.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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

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

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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

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

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 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

Out-of-body experience in vestibular disorders - A prospective study of 210 patients with dizziness.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior July 1, 2018 Christophe Lopez, Maya Elzière

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are states during which people experience their centre of awareness as located outside of their physical body, along with the sensation of seeing the environment from an elevated viewpoint. OBE is encountered in epilepsy, migraine and depersonalization, and it is not an uncommon experience in the general population. Current neuroscientific models of bodily...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.05.026 Full text Bodily self-consciousness Out-of-body experience Self-location Sensory conflict +1

Oscillatory brain mechanisms of the hypnotically-induced out-of-body experience.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior November 1, 2017 Maor Zeev-Wolf, Yair Dor-Ziderman, Abraham Goldstein et al.

One of the most challenging questions regarding the nature and neural basis of consciousness is the embodied dimension of the phenomenon, that is, feeling located within the body and viewing the world from that spatial perspective. Current theories in neurophysiology highlight the active role of multisensory and sensorimotor integration in supporting self-location and self-perspective, and...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.08.025 Full text Alpha band Gamma band Hypnotic suggestion Meg +3

Modelling psychiatric and cultural possession phenomena with suggestion and fMRI.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior April 1, 2014 Quinton Deeley, David A Oakley, Eamonn Walsh et al. 75 citations

Involuntary movements occur in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders and culturally influenced dissociative states (e.g., delusions of alien control and attributions of spirit possession). However, the underlying brain processes are poorly understood. We combined suggestion and fMRI in 15 highly hypnotically susceptible volunteers to investigate changes in brain activity accompanying...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2014.01.004 Full text Brain Cultural neuroscience Delusion of control Dissociation +7

The neurophenomenology of neutral hypnosis.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior February 1, 2013 Etzel Cardeña, Peter Jönsson, Devin B. Terhune et al. 151 citations

After a hypnotic induction, medium and highly hypnotizable individuals often report spontaneous alterations in various dimensions of consciousness. Few studies investigating these experiences have controlled for the inherent demands of specific hypnotic suggestions and fewer still have considered their dynamic properties and neural correlates. We adopted a neurophenomenological approach to...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2012.04.001 Full text

Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population: evidence for an increased role of temporal-lobe instability, body-distortion processing, and impairments in own-body transformations.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 2011 Jason J Braithwaite, Dana Samson, Ian Apperly et al.

Recent findings from studies of epileptic patients and schizotypes have suggested that disruptions in multi-sensory integration processes may underlie a predisposition to report out-of-body experiences (OBEs: Blanke et al., 2004; Mohr et al., 2006). It has been argued that these disruptions lead to a breakdown in own-body processing and embodiment. Here we present two studies which provide the...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2010.05.002 Full text

Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 2008 Christopher C French, Julia Santomauro, Victoria Hamilton et al.

Previous research has shown that people reporting contact with aliens, known as "experiencers", appear to have a different psychological profile compared to control participants. They show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief and experience, and possibly fantasy proneness. They also appear to show greater susceptibility to false memories as assessed using the...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2007.11.011 Full text

The transliminal brain at rest: baseline EEG, unusual experiences, and access to unconscious mental activity.

Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior 2008 Jessica I Fleck, Deborah L Green, Jennifer L Stevenson et al.

Transliminality reflects individual differences in the threshold at which unconscious processes or external stimuli enter into consciousness. Individuals high in transliminality possess characteristics such as magical ideation, belief in the paranormal, and creative personality traits, and also report the occurrence of manic/mystic experiences. The goal of the present research was to determine...

DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2007.08.024 Full text

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