Trends in Cognitive Sciences
July 7, 2026
Nicolas W Schuck, Marit Petzka, Stephen M Fleming
Noninvasive methods are making it possible to study neural replay in humans. Although focused on alignment with rodent findings, human research often tacitly assumes that replay is linked to conscious, deliberate thought. This assumption represents a missed opportunity to investigate the links between replay and consciousness, as well as cross-species differences more broadly.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2026
Patrick Butlin, Robert Long, Tim Bayne et al.
Rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities has drawn fresh attention to the prospect of consciousness in AI. There is an urgent need for rigorous methods to assess AI systems for consciousness, but significant uncertainty about relevant issues in consciousness science. We present a method for assessing AI systems for consciousness that involves exploring what follows from...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2026
Jean-Pierre Changeux, Michele Farisco
Debates in consciousness science increasingly question whether computational functionalism is sufficient to explain conscious processing. We summarize three core features of the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory that highlight the multilevel architecture of conscious processing, extending from cellular and molecular mechanisms to large-scale network dynamics. On this interpretation, GNW is...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
April 7, 2026
Francesco Ellia, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Contemporary consciousness science faces an impasse: competing theoretical frameworks-structuralist versus functionalist, universal versus local, intrinsic versus extrinsic-appear to be inducing philosophical deadlocks and conceptual standstills. While these debates have generated valuable insights, they have proceeded in parallel, without a systematic framework for understanding their...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
April 1, 2026
Ned Block
Computational functionalism claims that executing certain computations is sufficient for consciousness, regardless of the physical mechanisms implementing those computations. This view neglects a compelling alternative: that subcomputational biological mechanisms, which realize computational processes, are necessary for consciousness. By contrasting computational roles with their...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 17, 2025
Liad Mudrik, Nathan Faivre, Michael Pitts et al.
5 citations
Progress in the scientific study of consciousness has been impeded by several fundamental controversies. One pertains to a major divide between theories: sensory versus cognitive. Here, we argue that the key to resolving this controversy is to reevaluate the conceptual distinction proposed by Block in 1995 between phenomenal consciousness (P) and access consciousness (A). We propose that P and...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
August 18, 2025
Flora Moujaes, Nathalie M. Rieser, L. Belinger et al.
5 citations
Serotonergic psychedelics are being explored as treatments for a range of psychiatric conditions. Promising results in mood disorders indicate that their effects on emotional processing may play a central role in their therapeutic potential. However, mechanistic and clinical studies paint a complex picture of the impact of psychedelics on emotions and mood. Here, we review recent findings on...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
July 3, 2025
Andrew M. Haun, Giulio Tononi
5 citations
Many hold that visual experience is sparse and its richness illusory, relying on high-level summaries rather than detailed content. However, we argue here that seeing is more than this - it is unfathomably rich. We distinguish three levels of visual phenomenology: high level object and scene categorizations; mid-level feature groupings; and a fundamental spatial field composed of spots and...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
May 15, 2025
Matthew D. Lieberman
10 citations
Human subjectivity, our first-person conscious experience of the world, is among the deepest scientific mysteries. This opinion article lays out an approach to examining the neural correlates of subjectivity as it unfolds over time. Subjective experience is inherently idiosyncratic, arising from effortless interpretations that feel like perceived facts (p-interpretations), and integrative, with...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
March 12, 2025
Thomas Andrillon, Antoine Lutz, Jennifer Windt et al.
14 citations
During wakefulness, our thoughts transition between different contents. However, there are moments that are seemingly devoid of reportable content, referred to as mind blanking (MB). It remains unclear what these blanks represent, highlighting the definitional and phenomenological ambiguities surrounding MB. We map out MB in terms of its reportable expressions, neurophysiology, and relationship...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 1, 2024
Remington Mallett, Karen R Konkoly, Tore Nielsen et al.
Dreams have long captivated human curiosity, but empirical research in this area has faced significant methodological challenges. Recent interdisciplinary advances have now opened up new opportunities for studying dreams. This review synthesizes these advances into three methodological frameworks and describes how they overcome historical barriers in dream research. First, with observable...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
September 1, 2024
Ned Block
Disputes between rival theories of consciousness have often centered on whether perceptual contents can be decoded from the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Failures to decode from the PFC are taken to challenge 'cognitive' theories of consciousness such as the global workspace theory and higher-order monitoring theories, and decoding successes have been taken to confirm these theories. However, PFC...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
July 17, 2024
Stephen M Fleming, Nicholas Shea
26 citations
The quality space hypothesis about conscious experience proposes that conscious sensory states are experienced in relation to other possible sensory states. For instance, the colour red is experienced as being more like orange, and less like green or blue. Recent empirical findings suggest that subjective similarity space can be explained in terms of similarities in neural activation patterns....
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
May 1, 2024
Shaun Gallagher, Antonino Raffone, Salvatore M. Aglioti
Concepts of empathy, sympathy and compassion are often confused in a variety of literatures. This article proposes a pattern-theoretic approach to distinguishing compassion from empathy and sympathy. Drawing on psychology, Western philosophy, affective neuroscience, and contemplative science, we clarify the nature of compassion as a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
March 1, 2024
Tim Bayne, Anil K. Seth, Marcello Massimini et al.
Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness ('C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
March 1, 2024
Wen Wen, A. C. Chang, H. Imamizu
The sense of agency, which refers to the subjective feeling of control, is an essential aspect of self-consciousness. We argue that distinguishing between the sensitivity and criterion of this feeling is important for discussing individual differences in the sense of agency and its connections with other cognitive functions.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
October 1, 2023
Kevin Berryman, Sara W. Lazar, Jakob Hohwy
11 citations
Contemplative practices are a staple of modern life and have historically been intertwined with morality. However, do these practices in fact improve our morality? The answer remains unclear because the science of contemplative practices has focused on unidimensional aspects of morality, which do not align with the type of interdependent moral functioning these practices aspire to cultivate....
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
October 1, 2023
Tim Bayne, Joel Frohlich, Rhodri Cusack et al.
Highlights The study of infant (and fetal) consciousness is emerging as a distinctive research focus in the science of consciousness. Converging evidence from studies of functional network connectivity, attention, multimodal integration, and cortical responses to global oddballs suggests that consciousness is likely to be in place in early infancy and may even occur before birth. Recent...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
May 1, 2023
Biyu J. He
Theories of consciousness are often based on the assumption that a single, unified neurobiological account will explain different types of conscious awareness. However, recent findings show that, even within a single modality such as conscious visual perception, the anatomical location, timing, and information flow of neural activity related to conscious awareness vary depending on both...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 22, 2022
Christopher Timmermann, Prisca R. Bauer, Olivia Gosseries et al.
145 citations
No contemporary unifying framework has been provided for the study of non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs) despite increased interest in hypnosis, meditation, and psychedelics. NSCs induce shifts in experiential contents (what appears to the experiencer) and/or structure (how it appears). This can allow the investigation of the plastic and dynamic nature of experience from a multiscale...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2022
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas, Daniel Bor et al.
109 citations
The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is unprecedentedly ambitious in that it proposes a universal mathematical formula, derived from fundamental properties of conscious experience, to describe the quality of consciousness that it the of consciousness of in the the of in the the a of the that a from a of a the of the The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT) is...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2022
Michael Pereira, Denis Perrin, Nathan Faivre
The neural correlates supporting our perceptual experience of the world remain largely unknown. Recent studies have shown how stimulus detection and related confidence involve evidence accumulation (EA) processes similar to those involved in perceptual decision-making. Here, we propose that independently from any tasks, percepts are not static but fade in and out of consciousness according to...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 22, 2021
Cole Dembski, Christof Koch, Michael Pitts
Much research on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) has focused on two evoked potentials, the P3b and the visual or auditory awareness negativity (VAN, AAN). Surveying a broad range of recent experimental evidence, we find that repeated failures to observe the P3b during conscious perception eliminate it as a putative NCC. Neither the VAN nor the AAN have been dissociated from...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
June 1, 2021
Benjamin Baird, Stephen LaBerge, Giulio Tononi
13 citations
Dreamers were long thought absolutely isolated from the outside world. Yet psychophysiological studies over the past 40 years have firmly established that lucid dreamers can use eye movements to report on their dream content in real time while in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. We now also know that sensory input is not completely suppresssed during sleep. A recent study by Konkoly et al....
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
February 1, 2020
Axel Cleeremans, Dalila Achoui, Arnaud Beauny et al.
Consciousness remains a formidable challenge. Different theories of consciousness have proposed vastly different mechanisms to account for phenomenal experience. Here, appealing to aspects of global workspace theory, higher-order theories, social theories, and predictive processing, we introduce a novel framework: the self-organizing metarerpresentational account (SOMA), in which consciousness...