When Attended and Conscious Perception Deactivates Fronto-Parietal Regions

Abstract

Abstract Conscious and attended perception is commonly thought to elicit fronto-parietal activity. However, supportive evidence comes largely from studies which involve detecting a target and reporting its visibility. This approach confounds conscious perception with goal completion of either the perceptual task of detection or the metacognitive task of introspective reporting. In contrast, in real life such perceptions are a means of achieving goals and rarely a goal in themselves, and almost never involve explicit metacognitive reports. It therefore remains unclear if fronto-parietal activity is indeed a correlate of conscious perception or is the result of confounds related to goal completion. Here we show that conscious and attended perception when delinked from goals does not increase fronto-parietal activity, and when inconsequential for the goal may even deactivate these regions. In experiments 1 and 2 participants attended to a highly visible stream of letters to detect the occasional targets in their midst. The non-target letters, in spite of being visible and attended to, deactivated fronto-parietal regions. In experiment 3 we looked at the activity elicited by a loud auditory cue that had to be kept in memory for up to 9 s and used to select the correct rule for completing the goal. Even such a salient, attended and remembered event did not elicit prefrontal activity. Across these experiments conscious and attended perception only activated the relevant sensory regions while goal completion events activated fronto-parietal regions. Significance statement Consciousness and attended perception has been seen to correlate with fronto-parietal activity. This informs key theories of consciousness and attention, e.g. widespread availability of incoming information or its higher level representation causes perceptual awareness, or that top down attention during perception broadcasts incoming sensations into frontal and parietal regions. However such experiments unwittingly conflate attended and conscious perception with some form of goal completion, whereas such perception in our daily life mostly serves as a means of goal completion and not a goal in itself. Here we show that such perception when delinked from goal completion does not activate fronto-parietal regions, and may even deactivate these regions if the percept is inconsequential for goal completion.