Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
July 1, 2024
Marisa Carrasco, Miriam Spering
This Perspectives paper argues that experimental protocols examining qualitative differences between perception and action offer important insights into conscious and unconscious visual processing and their neural correlates. The authors present research using human eye movements as a sensitive measure of unconscious visual processing. They also caution that the growing use of oculomotor and pupillary responses in consciousness research should not lead researchers to infer conscious perception solely from no-report protocols, as these measures can reflect unconscious processing as well.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
July 1, 2024
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz
Consciousness in infants during the first year of life is difficult to study because they cannot report their experiences. Recent behavioral and brain imaging studies show that infants engage in complex learning and have more structured brains than previously thought. By applying global workspace theory, which identifies brain signatures of conscious perception in adults, evidence suggests conscious perception exists in the second half of the first year. Evidence before five months is less solid due to few studies. The question of conscious perception before term remains open, with the possibility of short periods that could facilitate early learning.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
July 1, 2024
Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio
Consciousness arises when three processes operate together: continuous generation of interoceptive feelings (experiencing the body's internal state), continuous production of sensory images from the organism's perspective, and a combination of these into subjectivity about those images. The biological basis involves peripheral and central interoceptive and exteroceptive physiology for the first two components, while the third depends on integration across the spinal cord, brainstem, diencephalic nuclei, and mesial cerebral cortices.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
May 2, 2024
Michelle J. Redinbaugh, Y. Saalmann
The basal ganglia, traditionally linked to reinforcement learning and action selection, also influence perception and conscious states by integrating information from across the cortex and thalamus. This review synthesizes anatomical, functional, and clinical evidence to show how the basal ganglia contribute to sensory gating, predictive processing, selective attention, and the representation of temporal event structure, shaping perceptual processing through their connections with cortical and thalamic regions.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
August 1, 2022
Tammi R. A. Kral, Regina C Lapate, Ted Imhoff‐Smith et al.
Long-term mindfulness meditation is associated with stronger functional connectivity between the posterior cingulate cortex and rostrolateral prefrontal cortex, lower connector hub strength across the default mode network, and better subjective attention. In a sample of 40 long-term meditators averaging 3759 hours of practice, compared with 124 meditation-naive controls, orienting attention positively correlated with PCC-RLPFC connectivity and negatively correlated with default mode network connector hub strength. These results suggest that PCC-RLPFC connectivity may support attention orienting, a core component of metacognitive awareness trained in mindfulness meditation.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
October 1, 2020
Louis N Irwin, Brian A Irwin
Cognitive science is increasingly influenced by embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive perspectives alongside traditional computational assumptions. Neuroscience has advanced understanding of brain function within classical frameworks, but newer alternative perspectives can enrich interpretations of many findings. These frameworks highlight how an animal's cognitive requirements are shaped by its environment, how biology and ecology coevolve to shape cognition, and how cognition extends beyond the brain. The embodied cognition paradigm reveals the central role of 'place' in the cognitive landscape, offering insights for cognitive scientists and philosophers. The concept of place applies to cognitive function, species comparisons, ecologically relevant experimental designs, and approaches to the 'hard problem' of consciousness.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
September 1, 2017
Mika Koivisto, Simone Grassini, Niina Salminen-Vaparanta et al.
Conscious detection of an object and conscious identification of that object rely on different neural processes. In an experiment measuring event-related potentials (ERPs), participants performed tasks requiring either detection or identification of a visual stimulus. Behaviorally, a stimulus could be consciously detected without being identified. A posterior electrophysiological signature occurring 200-300 milliseconds after stimulus onset was sensitive to conscious detection but not to identification, which correlated with later widespread brain activity. These findings provide behavioral and neural evidence for elementary visual experiences that are not yet enriched with higher-level knowledge, suggesting that research on consciousness should focus on early phenomenal experiences to avoid confounding effects of higher-level processes.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
June 1, 2017
Brian A Metzger, Kyle E Mathewson, Evelina Tapia et al.
The P3b brain wave, previously linked to visual awareness, is associated with updates in conscious perception rather than with processing external stimuli themselves. In a binocular rivalry experiment, participants viewed competing images, one per eye, and brief probes were flashed over the dominant or suppressed image. The timing of the P3b wave corresponded to when participants reported a perceptual switch, not to when the probe occurred. This supports the idea that P3b signals a change in what is consciously perceived. The amplitude of an earlier wave, the P1, predicted how quickly a perceptual reversal happened, and the amplitude of the P3b predicted the duration of a mixed-percept stage.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
January 1, 2017
Laurens Van Calster, Arnaud D'Argembeau, Eric Salmon et al.
Activity in the dorsal attention network fluctuates with subjective reports of attentional control, indicating that this network reflects perceived recruitment of controlled attentional processes during spontaneous cognition. Activity in the default mode network increases when participants report being in a subjective state of internal mentation, but not when they report being in a state of perception. The study provides direct evidence linking fluctuations of resting-state neural activity to fluctuations in specific cognitive processes.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
December 1, 2012
Kyle E Mathewson, Christopher Prudhomme, Monica Fabiani et al.
Rhythmic visual stimuli can entrain ongoing neural oscillations in the human brain, locking the timing of excitability cycles and enhancing processing of predictable stimuli. The study shows that the phase of existing brain oscillations can be modified by rhythmic visual stimulation in the alpha frequency band, leading to phase-locked fluctuations in excitability that produce concomitant fluctuations in visual awareness. This entrainment effect depended on the amount of spontaneous alpha power before the experiment and the level of 12-Hz oscillation before each trial, and could not be explained by evoked activity. The findings support a role for alpha oscillations as pulsed inhibition of cortical activity and provide evidence for the quantized nature of conscious experience.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
January 1, 2003
Magdalena J Fosse, Roar Fosse, J Allan Hobson et al.
Sleep mentation often reflects waking life, but not through exact replay of episodic memories. Over 14 days, 29 subjects logged daytime activities and dreams, scoring dream incorporation of waking experiences. Although 65% of 299 sleep mentation reports reflected aspects of recent waking life, episodic replay of waking events occurred in only 1-2% of dream reports. This suggests that sleep's role in memory processing is not primarily about replaying specific episodes, consistent with evidence that sleep does not consolidate episodic memories.