Abstract: Hallucinations arise from disruptions in neural processes that construct perceptual experience from sensory input. Progress in consciousness science may therefore benefit from methods that precisely characterize their phenomenology. We provide an initial validation of the Six-Dimensional Visual Hallucination Questionnaire (6D-VHQ), a brief instrument designed to quantify visual...
The high capacity of human iconic memory (IM) has been taken as evidence that visual experience is rich and detailed, as introspection suggests. Opponents to this view argue instead that this impression is illusory, with conscious access being mostly limited to what we can attend to. To provide evidence of either view, in this registered report we compared metacognitive sensitivity levels...
Upon a brief glance, how well can we differentiate what we see from what we do not? Previous studies answered this question as 'poorly'. This is in stark contrast with our everyday experience. Here, we consider the possibility that previous restriction in stimulus variability and response alternatives reduced what participants could express from what they consciously experienced. We introduce a...
While the concept of mindfulness is ubiquitous, its meaning is ambiguous, with limited knowledge about how it is understood by the general public. Understanding how laypeople perceive mindfulness and mindful people is vital, as it will impact how people interpret and act upon information about mindfulness and mindfulness practices. Study 1 participants evaluated the term mindfulness positively,...
Research has found that the vividness of conscious experience is related to brain dynamics. Despite both being anaesthetics, propofol and ketamine produce different subjective states: we explore the different effects of these two anaesthetics on the structure of dynamic attractors reconstructed from electrophysiological activity recorded from cerebral cortex of two macaques. We used two...
To understand animal wellbeing, we need to consider subjective phenomena and sentience. This is challenging, since these properties are private and cannot be observed directly. Certain motivations, emotions and related internal states can be inferred in animals through experiments that involve choice, learning, generalization and decision-making. Yet, even though there is significant progress...
Sleep scientists have shown that dreaming helps people improve their waking lives, and they have done so by developing sophisticated content analysis scales. Dream analysis entails time-consuming manual annotation of text. That is why dream reports have been recently mined with algorithms, and these algorithms focused on identifying emotions. In so doing, researchers have not tackled two main...
Unconscious perception, or perception without awareness, describes a situation where an observer's behaviour is influenced by a stimulus of which they have no phenomenal awareness. Perception without awareness is often claimed on the basis of a difference in thresholds for tasks that do and do not require awareness, for example, detecting the stimulus (requiring awareness) and making accurate...