Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2014
Tal Dotan Ben-Soussan, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Joseph Glicksohn et al.
Quadrato Motor Training (QMT), a structured walking meditation, improves spatial performance on the Hidden Figures Test (HFT) and affects brain connectivity differently in males and females. In a first study with 24 females, QMT led to greater improvement in HFT performance than verbal or simple motor training. A second study with 37 participants (20 males) found that after QMT, HFT performance improved in both genders, but EEG coherence changed in opposite directions: theta and alpha intra-hemispheric coherence increased in females and decreased in males. The findings suggest gender-dependent electrophysiological effects of QMT and highlight the need to study gender differences in contemplative neuroscience.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2014
Kristjan Loorits
The hard problem of consciousness, often considered unsolvable by empirical science, can be addressed through a structuralist framework in neuroscience. Qualia, or qualitative properties of experience, are argued to be compositional with internal structures that determine their nature, and these structures can be identified with specific neural patterns. Consciousness is understood as a complex neural pattern that misperceives some of its own structural properties as monadic and qualitative. This approach analyzes consciousness in fully structural terms, thereby claiming to solve the hard problem.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 18, 2013
H. Cruse, M. Schilling
An artificial neural network called reaCog, built on a decentralized, reactive architecture for hexapod walking and insect-like navigation, can invent new behaviors and plan ahead through internal simulation. The authors argue that, under a monist view that sets aside the phenomenal aspect of mental phenomena, reaCog exhibits properties such as bottom-up and top-down attention, intentions, volition, and some aspects of Access Consciousness—including planning, guiding new actions, and global accessibility of memory elements. These properties emerge from network cooperation, not explicit implementation. reaCog enables both reactive/automatic and access-conscious control, but lacks metacognition or Reflexive Consciousness. The authors suggest that even simple networks can display properties of consciousness when the phenomenal aspect is excluded.
Frontiers in Psychology
March 12, 2013
P. Brugger, B. Lenggenhager, M. Giummarra
Xenomelia, or 'foreign limb syndrome,' involves a person's persistent non-acceptance of a limb and desire for its amputation or paralysis. Originally viewed as a psychological disorder, recent emphasis on brain mechanisms has shifted focus to neural circuits. This article critiques both purely psychological and purely neurological accounts, arguing that neither fully explains the condition. The authors propose a 'xenomelia spectrum disorder' model that integrates social context, brain plasticity, and individual history shaped by culture. This approach respects the neuroanatomy of body awareness while acknowledging how lived experience and cultural background influence symptoms, advancing research on the unity of body and self.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Claire Braboszcz, B Rael Cahn, Bhavani Balakrishnan et al.
After a 3-month intensive meditation retreat, 82 Isha yoga practitioners showed increased correct responses to incongruent stimuli in the Stroop task and a reduction of the attentional blink. A positive correlation between previous meditation experience and accuracy to incongruent Stroop stimuli was observed at baseline, while a negative correlation between previous meditation experience and attentional blink performance was also found. Participants showed a bias toward local processing in the global-local letter task, with only slight performance differences pre- vs. post-retreat. The results do not clearly support or reject the hypothesis of meditation-driven neuronal plasticity in the attentional system for Isha yoga practice, given small effect sizes and no control group.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Neil Mehta, George A. Mashour
A complete theory of consciousness must explain both general consciousness (what makes any state conscious) and specific consciousness (what gives a conscious state its particular quality). First-order representationalism holds that consciousness consists of sensory representations directly available to a subject for action, belief, and planning. The authors provide a neuroscientific framework: neural correlates of general consciousness include prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, and non-specific thalamic nuclei, while specific consciousness involves sensory cortex and specific thalamic nuclei. They argue that recent data favor first-order representationalism over competing theories such as biological theory, higher-order representationalism, recurrent processing theory, information integration theory, and global workspace theory.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Anna M Borghi, Claudia Scorolli, Daniele Caligiore et al.
The paper proposes integrating the extended mind view and the embodied-grounded view of cognition by introducing the idea of "Words As social Tools" (WAT). It argues that words, due to their social and public nature, function as quasi-external devices that extend cognition, similar to how tools enlarge bodily space and modify the sense of body. The authors review literature on tool-use and words as tools, presenting evidence that word use extends space close to the body. They outline neural processes that may underpin this bodily space extension and discuss how combining both perspectives overcomes limitations of each view alone.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Bernard J. Baars, Stan Franklin, Thomas Zoega Ramsoy
A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub for binding and propagating signals among loosely coupled signaling elements, and in the brain it may underlie conscious experiences. The cortico-thalamic core is thought to support conscious perception, thinking, learning, feelings of knowing, emotions, visual imagery, working memory, and executive control. Conscious contents are unitary and consistent at any moment but form a large, open set over time, suggesting the GW capacity is not localized to a single anatomical hub but is a dynamic functional capacity—a kind of neuronal cloud computing. Conscious contents may arise when multiple input streams settle on a winner-take-all equilibrium, igniting an any-to-many broadcast lasting about 100–200 ms. Conscious moments hold only 1–4 unrelated items, a small focal capacity that may be the biological price for global access.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Christopher L Edwards, Perrine Ruby, Josie E Malinowski et al.
Dreams can be a source of personal insight, supported by findings that sleep facilitates cognitive insight and REM sleep aids emotional memory consolidation. Metaphorical representations in dreams may enable novel insights. In 11 dream group discussion sessions using the Ullman Dream Appreciation technique with 11 participants (10 females, 1 male; mean age 19.2 years), self-ratings showed the technique effectively connects dream content to recent waking life, though only 14% of dream text had identifiable waking sources. The mean Exploration-Insight score on the Gains from Dream Interpretation questionnaire was very high, comparable to therapist-led methods, and associated with pre-group positive attitudes toward dreams. The need to distinguish insight from discovering a waking life source is discussed, along with difficulties in designing control conditions.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Perrine Ruby, Camille Blochet, Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub et al.
People who often remember their dreams (high-recallers, averaging 4.42 dream recalls per week) show a more sustained decrease in alpha brainwave activity (8–12 Hz) in response to hearing their own first name during wakefulness compared to low-recallers (0.25 recalls per week). This alpha decrease, measured at the Pz electrode site 1000–1200 milliseconds after the sound, suggests deeper processing of complex sounds in high-recallers, possibly reflecting a longer release of inhibition in brain regions not needed for the task. No group difference in alpha reactivity was found during REM sleep. High-recallers also experienced more time awake during the night (30 vs. 14 minutes), supporting the idea that trait differences in brain physiology underlie dream recall frequency.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Ralf-Peter Behrendt
Unitary conscious experience can be defined as a symbolic representation of the pattern of hippocampal neuronal firing that encodes an event memory. At each cycle of the θ rhythm, the hippocampus rapidly forms event codes that integrate object information from the ventral visual stream and orbitofrontal cortex, contextual emotional information from the anterior insula, and spatial environmental information from the dorsal visual stream. These event codes, formed in the CA3-dentate network for memorization, are allocentric representations, similar to conscious experiences of events in a seemingly objective framework of phenomenal space and time. Conscious perception is evolutionarily related to autobiographical memory recall, mental imagery, dreaming, and hallucinations, and evidence for hippocampal contributions to these phenomena is reviewed.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2012
Isadora Olivé, Alain Berthoz
Self-consciousness relies on body ownership (attributing self-identity to the body) and self-location (localizing the sense of self). The rubber-hand illusion (RHI) and out-of-body experience (OBE) are thought to target body-part and full-body representations separately, but their relationship is unclear. Using a virtual-reality task combining adapted RHI and OBE, a spatial dissociation between visual and proprioceptive hand feedback was created during rest or action. Proprioceptive drift of the left hand and shifts in subjective-straight-ahead (SSA) toward the manipulation side were equivalent in both conditions. The combined effect depended on visual representation of body parts, with no main or modulatory role for motor programs. This demonstrates a systematic relationship between body-part and full-body illusions, suggesting a common mechanism underpinning ownership and self-location.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2011
Shimon Edelman
A person cannot empirically determine whether they are awake or dreaming because any statistical test of reality (e.g., checking for bizarreness) requires baseline measurements that could be tampered with by the same processes generating the dream or simulation. Cryptographic defenses also fail, as reality modification within a dream can extend to verification keys or declared outcomes. Given this double predicament, the rational course is to take reality at face value. Even insights like Buddhist enlightenment are ultimately unreliable for the same reason, though one must be aware of this principle—which may be impossible in altered states like dreaming or religious experience.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2011
Catherine Tallon-Baudry
A review of neurophysiological evidence examines whether consciousness and attention share the same neural mechanisms or are distinct. Three mechanisms linked to both—neural amplification, fronto-parietal network involvement, and oscillatory synchrony—are evaluated. The review concludes that commonalities at the neural level may have been overestimated, and experiments probing both attention and consciousness point toward a dissociation between the two concepts. A "cumulative influence model" is proposed, where attention and consciousness correspond to distinct neural mechanisms that feed a single decisional process leading to behavior. Consciousness should not be considered a top-level executive function but defined by its experiential properties.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2010
Jeroen J A Van Boxtel, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Christof Koch
Selective attention and consciousness, once thought to be tightly linked, can be dissociated. Psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence shows that people can attend to objects they do not consciously see. More debated is whether people can become conscious of an isolated object or a scene's gist with almost no top-down attention. Recent studies that independently manipulate attention and consciousness reveal paradoxical effects, including cases where the two have opposing influences. Neuroimaging using EEG, MEG, and fMRI has identified distinct neural correlates for each, suggesting attention acts as an analyzer and consciousness as a synthesizer. Separating these processes is crucial for understanding the neural substrates of consciousness.