Seeing Beyond the Human: Challenges and Advances in Animal Studies of Visual Consciousness
February 20, 2026 Ege Kingir, Melanie Wilke preprint
To understand the neural mechanisms of visual consciousness, researchers must first develop perceptual report and no-report paradigms in humans that accurately reflect subjective experiences, then transfer these paradigms to animals for high-throughput electrophysiology and cell- or pathway-specific perturbations. This chapter reviews experimental approaches including visual illusions, visual masking, and bistable perception paradigms used to investigate conscious perception across species. The combined evidence from these approaches provides the most refined picture of how animals subjectively experience the visual world. Results from non-human primate studies concerning neural circuitry underlying visual consciousness disorders such as blindsight and spatial neglect are also presented.