Editorial: Methodological issues in consciousness research, volume II.

Abstract

The study of consciousness spans a vast array of domains, including perceptual awareness, cognition and metacognition, executive control, selfhood, sleep and dreaming, emotional competence, and empathy. It concerns both healthy states (e.g., meditation, aging, spiritual experiences) and pathological conditions (e.g., epilepsy, neglect syndromes, locked-in syndrome, minimally conscious states, anesthesia). Despite decades of interdisciplinary research, the fundamental nature and mechanisms of consciousness remain elusive (Dehaene et al., 2017;Seth & Bayne, 2022). Several key theoretical distinctions continue to fuel debate. For instance, the differentiation between phenomenal and access consciousness (Block, 1995), the pre-reflective (minimal) and the reflective (narrative) self (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008), or between graded and all-or-none processing (Overgaard et al., 2006) remain unsettled. Similarly, methodological controversies persist: how to best measure awareness, how to establish its absence, and how to isolate the neural correlates of consciousness (Mashour et al., 2020). Recent debates also highlight the limitations of current paradigms in distinguishing necessary from incidental neural correlates (Koch et al., 2016). This Research Topic gathered recent contributions that address these theoretical and methodological challenges from diverse perspectives.A core challenge in consciousness research is developing reliable measures that capture different levels and manifestations of awareness. Jia et al. (2024) introduce the Awareness Atlas, a novel selfreport scale aimed at assessing what they called the 'manifestations of consciousness', i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and affective effects of different levels of awareness. This approach emphasizes the practical implications of measuring consciousness beyond its theoretical construct, particularly in areas like meditation research and clinical interventions. Watanabe & Moriguchi (2024) contribute to the long-standing debate on graded versus all-or-none consciousness. By applying the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) to an online discrimination task in children and adults, they provide evidence supporting a gradual emergence of conscious content. Notably, their findings suggest that while age does not significantly alter the emergence of subjective awareness, the gap between subjective experience and objective discrimination narrows over time.