Where is the ‘posterior hot zone’? Open Review of Cogitate et al (2023): “An Adversarial Collaboration to Critically Evaluate Theories of Consciousness”

Abstract

The target of this review is the June 26, 2023 version of a recent preprint (1), in which the authors reported the first set of results of a highly publicized project (Cogitate) generously supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The aim of the ongoing project is to empirically arbitrate between two theories of consciousness in the form of an adversarial collaboration. Overall, the project is strong in large part because of the scale, ample funding, and some aspects of the quality and quantity of the data. Unfortunately, there are several inherent flaws in the experimental design that limit the interpretations of these studies. However, the current studies were skillfully executed, and the data will no doubt be very useful for future studies. Also, an upcoming second set of future studies, as anticipated in the discussion section, sound relatively promising.The most surprising and critical problem here concerns the anatomical definitions of the regions of interests (ROIs), without which the hypotheses are unspecified and meaningless in practice. The selection of ROIs for IIT, which neglected the formalisms of the theory, excluded areas originally labeled as part of the so-called ‘posterior hot zone’ (e.g. precuneus, posterior cingulate (5)), and instead included important frontal areas as ‘extended’ ROIs, will puzzle many, and probably be considered false advertisement by others. Excluding parietal regions for GNWT likewise went against how the theory (GNWT) has been characterized in print. Although the study was overall pre-registered, these critical and surprising ROI definitions were only uploaded to OSF in Dec 2022 - by which point data collection was probably already completed or near completion - and made public as recently as late June 2023.In other words, while the current studies tested some partially (?) pre-registered hypotheses made by some theorists, these hypotheses were unfortunately developed and tested in rather idiosyncratic ways, compromising their relevance to the topic. But the vast amount of data collected will no doubt still be tremendously useful for other researchers and for different scientific purposes. Below I discuss both some strengths and limitations of the preprint in more detail.