A late meta-stable code of conscious access in the absence of report
Brendan Hutchinson, Stanislas Dehaene, Heleen A. Slagter, Michael Pitts
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) February 2, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.64898/2026.01.30.702733 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Secondary analysis of electroencephalography data from no-report inattentional blindness experiments |
|---|---|
| Key findings | Re-analysis of four no-report inattentional blindness EEG datasets shows that decoding of consciously seen stimuli generalized across time for shapes, faces, and words, even when no P3b was evoked. The authors argue this late metastable pattern, most consistent 200-400 ms post-stimulus, may be a more general signature of conscious access than the P3b. |
Abstract
Abstract One of the most widely recognised neural correlates of consciousness, the P3b, has been challenged in recent years as a neural signal linked to conscious processing, due to its absence in no-report paradigms. Here, we test whether, even in the absence of a P3b, a period of late metastable brain activity may provide a more general signature of conscious access to perceptual information. To this end, we leverage modern advances in electroencephalography (EEG) analyses, re-examining four datasets from no-report inattentional blindness experiments—all of which failed to find a P3b for consciously seen task irrelevant stimuli— using cross-time multivariate decoding analyses on the EEG data. We find robust temporal generalization of decoding for consciously seen stimuli across different stimulus types (shapes, faces, words), independent of report requirements and regardless of whether a P3b was evoked. This temporal generalization occurred most consistently 200-400 milliseconds post-stimulus onset, suggesting a meta-stable neural code for conscious processing in a time window typically associated with cognitive access to perceptual content. These consistent temporal generalization patterns across stimulus types indicate a potentially universal signature of conscious access.