cIRcle (University of British Columbia)
September 4, 2026
Lisa Anne van den Beld
This dissertation investigated autonomic physiological correlates of two fundamental experiential states: presence and absence. Presence was defined as self-regulated attention to present-moment experience, which is the first component of mindfulness. Absence was defined as a lack of such attention, encompassed by the state of mindlessness or dearth of mindful awareness to the moment. Guided by...
Culture & Psychology
September 4, 2026
Lea Loncar, Charlotte Fiskum
The Indian concept of Jīvanmukti - liberation while living - offers a critical challenge to dominant psychological models centred on ego integration, identity coherence, and performance. Drawing on cultural psychology, phenomenology, and classical Indian philosophy, this article examines how experiences of altered selfhood may be understood either as pathological dissociation within clinical...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 4, 2026
Elena Ryss
preprint
A prominent view in cognitive science and philosophy of mind holds that consciousness is metacognition—that subjective experience is reducible to the brain monitoring, evaluating, and commenting on its own operations. This article challenges that claim. We argue that qualia—the elementary, irreducible qualities of lived experience—are fundamentally distinct from metacognition, which is...
September 4, 2026
Patxi Elosegi, Pietro Amerio, Ning Mei et al.
preprint
A central challenge in consciousness research is to dissociate perception from awareness using rigorous, bias-free methods. Traditional approaches often suffer from two key limitations: the criterion biases in reporting perceptual (un)awareness, and the criterion content fallacy, where awareness measures do not capture the specific information required to perform the perceptual task. These...
Brain Communications
September 3, 2026
Desirée Conti, Tommaso Accinni, Alice Teghil et al.
Abstract Visual awareness includes the ability to distinguish internally generated sensory experience from veridical percepts derived from the external world. Visual hallucinations (VH) are an example of internally generated experience with important clinical implications and are common in Lewy body disease (LBD), with some patients aware of their hallucinations and others not. The awareness...
September 3, 2026
Walter Ott
Abstract John Locke’s theory of perception takes shape in a time of chaos: the orthodox account of this most basic tie between mind and world is crumbling. Among the ruins, new combatants vie for dominance against the old Aristotelian view, chief among them the Cartesians and the neo-Epicureans. The aim of this book is to provide a unified reading of Locke’s theory of perception, informed by...
Frontiers in Psychology
September 3, 2026
Bongsu Kang, Chang-Eop Kim
Research on AI consciousness has largely focused on whether AI systems are conscious and how humans attribute consciousness to them. Yet large language models (LLMs) increasingly function as consciousness attributors, generating judgments about whether and to what degree other entities are conscious. We introduce model-generated consciousness attribution as an object of empirical...
Irish Geography
September 2, 2026
Imogen O'Connor
This mixed method study employed survey and interviews to explore in an Irish context, whether Indigenous perspectives on nature have persisted. It examined sixty-five participants’ experiences of connection and communication with nature places, their place-based cultural influences, and their environmental beliefs and behaviours. Employing a phenomenological perspective, findings revealed...
Royal Society Open Science
September 2, 2026
Trevor Hewitt, Anil K. Seth, David J. Schwartzman
Abstract: Hallucinations arise from disruptions in neural processes that construct perceptual experience from sensory input. Progress in consciousness science may therefore benefit from methods that precisely characterize their phenomenology. We provide an initial validation of the Six-Dimensional Visual Hallucination Questionnaire (6D-VHQ), a brief instrument designed to quantify visual...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
September 2, 2026
Yarin Szachter, Almog Simchon, D. Kalev et al.
Abstract Sense of Agency (SoA), the subjective experience of initiating and controlling one’s actions, is a critical component of self-perception and consciousness, and is often degraded in different psychopathologies. Individuals with dissociation seem to have diminished SoA, but it is yet unknown whether this affects communication with their surroundings. This study employs Natural Language...