Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Colin Klein, Andrew B Barron
6 citations
An increasing number of authors are willing to attribute phenomenal consciousness to relatively simple organisms like insects. Yet it is not at all clear what functional role the substrates of consciousness would play. Here, we argue phenomenal consciousness is a consequence of how mobile animals with spatial senses and a capacity for goal-directed behaviour resolve the complex problem of...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Léa Moncoucy, Krzysztof Dołęga, Catherine Tallon-Baudry et al.
5 citations
DC. Dennett (2020,personal communication) asked: 'How do we go from doing things for reasons to having reasons for doing things?'. This question targets a fundamental shift in nature: while all organisms act in the way they do for reasons that are shaped by extrinsic evolutionary cost functions, some also act for reasons of their own, even engaging in behaviour that may be detrimental to their...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Irina Mikhalevich
2 citations
This essay articulates three distinct but interrelated challenges facing evolutionary explanations of consciousness. These are: (i) lingering misconceptions about evolutionary explanations that stem from evolutionary progressivism and adaptationism; (ii) the 'measurement problem,' or the challenge of gathering comparative data on consciousness, as required by any evolutionary accounts, in the...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Antonella Tramacere
1 citation
An important feature of conscious experience is the subjectivity of time. Even within short durations, ranging from milliseconds to a few seconds, time slows down in threatening situations, while it compresses during familiar tasks. Do these temporal distortions have a function? In this article, I argue that they do. Because the perceived duration of events is often in line with what seems...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Nicholas Humphrey
1 citation
In the history of life, consciousness of sensory states with 'phenomenal properties'-the basis of 'sentience'-is, arguably, a late evolutionary development, which occurred long after conscious access to a 'global mental workspace' had become widely established as a strategy for cognitive information processing. In this article, I focus on phenomenal consciousness. I propose a step-by-step...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Gianmarco Maldarelli, Onur Güntürkün
In this article, we start from the assumption that consciousness is not the ultimate triumph of human evolution but rather represents a more basic cognitive process, possibly shared with other animal phyla. In this article, we show that there is growing evidence that (i) birds have sensory and self-awareness, and (ii) they also have the neural architecture that may be necessary for this. We...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Masanori Kohda, Shumpei Sogawa, Redouan Bshary
Self-awareness in animals is often documented by showing evidence for mirror self-recognition (MSR), which is confirmed by the mirror mark-test. The classic assumption about self-awareness was that it is a complex cognitive process, restricted at best to a few large-brained species. Indeed, early MSR research yielded positive results only in great apes, elephants, dolphins and magpies, while...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 4, 2024
Felipe De Brigard
12 citations
Ever since Tulving's influential 1985 article 'Memory and consciousness', it has become traditional to think of autonoetic consciousness as necessary for episodic memory. This paper questions this claim. Specifically, it argues that the construct of autonoetic consciousness lacks validity and that, even if it was valid, it would still not be necessary for episodic memory. The paper ends with a...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
July 29, 2024
Yihao Jiang, Yiyan Dong, Hailan Hu
Substantial clinical evidence has unravelled the superior antidepressant efficacy of ketamine: in comparison to traditional antidepressants targeting the monoamine systems, ketamine, as an N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antagonist, acts much faster and more potently. Surrounding the antidepressant mechanisms of ketamine, there is ample evidence supporting an NMDAR-antagonism-based...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
January 29, 2024
Claudia Muth, Claus-Christian Carbon
11 citations
Predictive Processing (PP) provides a theoretical framework that describes perception as a process attempting to increase the predictability of stimulations by updating predictions or exploring new sensations. Moreover, perception and action are assumed to be closely linked within this process. While organisms seem to strive for predictability, we sometimes expose ourselves to objects and...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
January 29, 2024
Karin Kukkonen
6 citations
Predictive processing is a recent approach in cognitive science that describes the brain as an engine of probabilistic hierarchical inference. Initially proposed as a general theory of brain function, predictive processing has recently been expanding to account for questions of consciousness in philosophy and neuroscience. In my previous work (Kukkonen 2020 Probability designs: literature and...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
February 13, 2023
Dimitris Bolis, Guillaume Dumas, Leonhard Schilbach
71 citations
In this article, we analyse social interactions, drawing on diverse points of views, ranging from dialectics, second-person neuroscience and enactivism to dynamical systems, active inference and machine learning. To this end, we define interpersonal attunement as a set of multi-scale processes of building up and materializing social expectations-put simply, anticipating and interacting with...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
February 14, 2022
Thurston Lacalli
The similarities between amphioxus and vertebrate brains, in their regional subdivision, cell types and circuitry, make the former a useful benchmark for understanding the evolutionary innovations that shaped the latter. Locomotory control systems were already well developed in basal chordates, with the ventral neuropile of the dien-mesencephalon serving to set levels of activity and initiate...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
February 1, 2021
Jarrod Gott, Leonore Bovy, Emma Peters et al.
33 citations
Metacognitive reflections on one's current state of mind are largely absent during dreaming. Lucid dreaming as the exception to this rule is a rare phenomenon; however, its occurrence can be facilitated through cognitive training. A central idea of respective training strategies is to regularly question one's phenomenal experience: is the currently experienced world real, or just a dream? Here,...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
December 9, 2019
David J. Schwartzman, Daniel Bor, Nicolas Rothen et al.
7 citations
People with synaesthesia have additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. Synaesthesia therefore offers a unique window into the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying conscious perception. A long-standing question in synaesthesia research is whether it is possible to artificially induce non-synaesthetic individuals to have...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Lionel Naccache
138 citations
According to a popular distinction proposed by the philosopher Ned Block in 1995, our conscious experience would overflow the very limited set of what we can consciously report to ourselves and to others. He proposed to coin this limited consciousness 'Access Consciousness' (A-Cs) and to define 'Phenomenal Consciousness' as a much richer subjective experience that is not accessed but that would...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Michael Pitts, Lydia A Lutsyshyna, Steven A. Hillyard
135 citations
Tensions between global neuronal workspace theory and recurrent processing theory have sparked much debate in the field of consciousness research. Here, we focus on one of the key distinctions between these theories: the proposed relationship between attention and consciousness. By reviewing recent empirical evidence, we argue that both theories contain key insights and that certain aspects of...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Ian Phillips
116 citations
Is phenomenal consciousness constitutively related to cognitive access? Despite being a fundamental issue for any science of consciousness, its empirical study faces a severe methodological puzzle. Recent years have seen numerous attempts to address this puzzle, either in practice, by offering evidence for a positive or negative answer, or in principle, by proposing a framework for eventual...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Morten Overgaard
62 citations
In consciousness research, it is common to distinguish between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Recently, a number of scientists have attempted to show that phenomenal content can be empirically separated from cognitive access and, accordingly, that the mental content that is accessed is not (always) identical to the content that is experienced. One notable position is that of...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Peter Fazekas, Morten Overgaard
30 citations
The problem of perceptual consciousness-the question of how our subjective experiences (colours as we see them; sounds as we hear them; tastes, etc., as we feel them) could be accounted for in terms of brain processes-is often regarded as the greatest unsolved mystery of our times. In recent literature, one of the most pressing questions in this regard is whether the neural basis of perceptual...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Emily J Ward
20 citations
Our in-the-moment experience of the world can feel vivid and rich, even when we cannot describe our experience due to limitations of attention, memory or other cognitive processes. But the nature of visual awareness is quite sparse, as suggested by the phenomena of failures of awareness, such as change blindness and inattentional blindness. I will argue that once failures of memory or failures...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Jesper Mogensen, Morten Overgaard
17 citations
In the present communication, phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness and the closely related concept of working memory are presented in the context of a neurocognitive model-the REF (reorganization of elementary functions) framework. The REF framework is based on connectionist networks within which the 'units' are advanced processing modules called elementary functions (EFs). In this...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Daniel C. Dennett
The so-called hard problem of consciousness is a chimera, a distraction from the hard question of consciousness, which is once some content reaches consciousness, 'then what happens?'. This question is seldom properly asked, for reasons good and bad, but when asked it opens up avenues of research that promise to dissolve the hard problem and secure a scientifically sound theory of how the human...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Peter Fazekas, Georgina Nemeth
This paper approaches the debate whether perceptual consciousness requires cognitive access from the perspective of dream studies, and investigates what kind of findings could support the opposing views of this debate. Two kinds of arguments are discussed, one that claims that the hypoactivity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in rapid eye movement sleep is directly relevant, and another...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
September 19, 2018
Victor A. F. Lamme
Significant progress has been made in the study of consciousness. Promising theories have been developed and a wealth of experimental data has been generated, both guiding us towards a better understanding of this complex phenomenon. However, new challenges have surfaced. Is visual consciousness about the seeing or the knowing that you see? Controversy about whether the conscious experience is...