When people view a steady, unchanging image, the brain's sensory regions maintain a stable representation of what is being seen, even as overall neural activity changes over time. In contrast, frontal and parietal brain areas only represent the image's content briefly at the moment it first appears. These findings, based on intracranial recordings from ten people with epilepsy, suggest that sustained conscious perception may depend on sensory cortex, while discrete perceptual updates may rely on frontoparietal regions.
Activity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for conscious perception, contradicting claims that PFC lesions do not affect subjective experience, that PFC activity does not reflect perceptual content, or that its role is solely due to task-related reporting. Empirical evidence shows PFC is essential for subjective experience in perception, not just for performing visual tasks. Confusing these two aspects can lead to misunderstandings.