A neural representation of invisibility: when stimulus-specific neural activity negatively correlates with conscious experience

Davidson, Matthew; Mithen, Will; Hogendoorn, Hinze; Boxtel, Jeroen J.A. van; Tsuchiya, Naotsugu

doi:10.1101/2020.04.20.051334

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…However, this is not always the case. Recent work demonstrated that under some circumstances, the exact opposite can be found (Matthew J Davidson, Mithen, Hogendoorn, vanBoxtel, & Tsuchiya, 2020;Merten & Nieder, 2012).…”

Section: Single Neuronal Activity Correlates With Attention and Conscmentioning

confidence: 99%

Growing evidence for separate neural mechanisms for attention and consciousness

Maier

Tsuchiya

2020

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Our conscious experience of the world seems to go in lockstep with our attentional focus: we tend to see, hear, taste and feel what we attend to, and vice versa. This tight coupling between attention and consciousness has given rise to the idea that these two phenomena are indivisible. In the late 1950s, the honoree of this special issue, Charles Eriksen, was among a small group of early pioneers that sought to investigate whether a transient increase in overall level of attention (alertness) in response to a noxious stimulus can be decoupled from conscious perception using experimental techniques. Recent years saw a similar debate regarding whether attention and consciousness are two dissociable processes. Initial evidence that attention and consciousness are two separate processes primarily rested on behavioral data. However, the past couple of years witnessed an explosion of studies aimed at testing this conjecture using neuroscientific techniques. Here we provide an overview of these and related empirical studies on the distinction between the neuronal correlates of attention and consciousness, and detail how advancements in theory and technology can bring about a more detailed understanding of the two. We argue that the most promising approach will combine ever evolving neurophysiological and interventionist tools with quantitative, empirically testable theories of consciousness that are grounded in a mathematically formalized understanding of phenomenology.

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Section: Single Neuronal Activity Correlates With Attention and Conscmentioning

confidence: 99%

Growing evidence for separate neural mechanisms for attention and consciousness

Maier

Tsuchiya

2020

Atten Percept Psychophys

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Self-Regulation of the Posterior–Frontal Brain Activity with Real-Time fMRI Neurofeedback to Influence Perceptual Discrimination

Kim,

Dalboni da Rocha,

Birbaumer

et al. 2024

Brain Sciences

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The Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) hypothesis states that the visual percept is available to conscious awareness only if recurrent long-distance interactions among distributed brain regions activate neural circuitry extending from the posterior areas to prefrontal regions above a certain excitation threshold. To directly test this hypothesis, we trained 14 human participants to increase blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signals with real-time functional magnetic resonance imaging (rtfMRI)-based neurofeedback simultaneously in four specific regions of the occipital, temporal, insular and prefrontal parts of the brain. Specifically, we hypothesized that the up-regulation of the mean BOLD activity in the posterior–frontal brain regions lowers the perceptual threshold for visual stimuli, while down-regulation raises the threshold. Our results showed that participants could perform up-regulation (Wilcoxon test, session 1: p = 0.022; session 4: p = 0.041) of the posterior–frontal brain activity, but not down-regulation. Furthermore, the up-regulation training led to a significant reduction in the visual perceptual threshold, but no substantial change in perceptual threshold was observed after the down-regulation training. These findings show that the up-regulation of the posterior–frontal regions improves the perceptual discrimination of the stimuli. However, further questions as to whether the posterior–frontal regions can be down-regulated at all, and whether down-regulation raises the perceptual threshold, remain unanswered.

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A neural representation of invisibility: when stimulus-specific neural activity negatively correlates with conscious experience

Abstract: 24Although visual awareness of an object typically increases neural responses, we 25

Cited by 2 publications

References 58 publications

Growing evidence for separate neural mechanisms for attention and consciousness

Growing evidence for separate neural mechanisms for attention and consciousness

Self-Regulation of the Posterior–Frontal Brain Activity with Real-Time fMRI Neurofeedback to Influence Perceptual Discrimination

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