Front Psychol
May 12, 2026
Salvatore G. Chiarella, Matteo Laurenzi, Marianna D’Onofrio et al.
People often show a double bias when attributing consciousness to non-human systems. Non-human animals receive low attributions of consciousness despite behavioral and neurobiological evidence suggesting subjective experience, while disembodied AI systems like large language models receive elevated attributions of consciousness despite lacking sensory or bodily substrates. This asymmetry indicates that folk judgments are shaped more by observers' cue-weighting heuristics than by the intrinsic properties of the systems. The authors propose that multidimensional, non-hierarchical frameworks, such as Birch's model and the Pattern Theory of Self, can serve as diagnostic tools to study how evidence dimensions are weighted in attributional contexts, replacing a ladder of human-like capacities with a landscape of profiles across taxa and system types.
Front Psychol
April 29, 2026
Xun Ma, Aoping Wang
The paper critically reviews quantum theories of consciousness, assessing their feasibility, philosophical sufficiency, and empirical testability. It argues that while such theories offer intriguing possibilities, they currently lack robust empirical support and face significant philosophical challenges, including issues of coherence and explanatory power. The review concludes that quantum approaches to consciousness remain speculative and insufficiently grounded in evidence, suggesting that more rigorous theoretical development and experimental testing are needed before they can be considered viable explanations.
Front Psychol
April 2, 2026
Olga Klamut, Simon Weissenberger
People who are more aware of internal bodily signals (interoceptive awareness) report better sleep and digestion, and this link is partly explained by having a balanced time perspective—an even orientation toward past, present, and future. The findings suggest that sensing the body helps regulate conscious experience not just through automatic bodily processes but also through how people think about time. This supports a model where bodily awareness and temporal orientation work together to maintain psychological and physical stability.
Front Psychol
March 30, 2026
Gerry Leisman, Raymond Roy, Rahela Alfasi
Perception is not a passive reconstruction of external stimuli but emerges through active, embodied interaction with the environment, according to a theoretical integration of embodied cognition and artificial intelligence. Evidence from neuroscience, developmental psychology, autism research, and AI shows that perceptual meaning arises from lawful relations among bodily constraints, action, and environmental feedback. Recent AI models like embodied reinforcement learning and active inference treat perception as inseparable from action, using closed-loop, predictive systems. The paper argues that embodiment functions as a generative constraint enabling robust sensory cognition. It extends this framework to autism spectrum disorder, proposing that sensory differences reflect variations in embodied self-organization and predictive regulation rather than cognitive deficits. Embodied AI systems could serve as testbeds for exploring these perceptual mechanisms.
Front Psychol
March 20, 2026
Cheongil Kim, Sang Chul Chong
Intuitions about consciousness are more accurate and reliable than previously assumed, as recent findings show that cases seeming to reveal counterintuitive dissociations between consciousness and functions can be explained by partial awareness. The authors argue that consciousness is a metacognitive model of internal representations, and intuitions about consciousness are metacognitive models of the relationship between internal representations and functions. This reframing explains their accuracy and reliability and links them to well-studied cognitive functions like confidence, target templates, attention modes, and awareness of absence.
Front Psychol
January 5, 2026
Hu Ren
Quantitative psychology treats self-consciousness as a measurable attribute, using scales and causal models from a third-person perspective, but faces issues like contextual dependence and lack of natural units. Phenomenology, following Husserl, instead examines the pre-reflective, first-person dimension of self-consciousness that underlies all experience. It clarifies the meaning of measured scores by grounding them in lived experience, reframing contextual dependence as a feature rather than a limitation. The paper argues that phenomenology complements quantitative approaches by addressing meaning before causality, without dismissing the value of third-person analysis.
Front Psychol
November 25, 2025
Zoran Josipovic
The search for a single unifying theory or universal principle reflects a deep intuition that a singular essence—nondual awareness, or consciousness itself—underlies all experience. Contemplative traditions describe this awareness as free from mental constructs, uncaused, and relatively unchanging across experiences, metaphorically without birth or death. While scientific understanding of consciousness has grown exponentially, understanding nondual awareness remains elusive, with each generation contributing unique insights while repeating similar mistakes. The author previously distinguished nondual awareness from perceptual, affective, and cognitive contents, and from functions like attention and memory. This work sketches issues related to ontology, epistemics, participant reports, and experiment design in studying nondual awareness.
Front Psychol
May 30, 2025
Satya Pradhan
A new framework for measuring consciousness is proposed, drawing on consciousness theories and engineering concepts like measurement workflow, problem space analysis, and observability. It introduces measurability criteria and applies them to various use cases, assessing whether current theories and technologies can measure consciousness attributes in those contexts. The framework is intended to help researchers and engineers determine the feasibility of developing a consciousness measurement system for specific applications.
Front Psychol
May 7, 2025
Monia D'Angiò, Luca Simione, Xerxes D. Arsiwalla et al.
This collection of articles presents diverse perspectives on consciousness research, including new theories and methodological frameworks. Fink proposes direct neurophenomenal structuralism linking neural structures to experience without intermediate explanations. Josipovic argues conscious awareness does not require mental representations, highlighting non-dual awareness with an implicit-explicit gradient. Oblak et al. demonstrate personalized network models can incorporate qualitative phenomenology in clinical psychiatry. Tsuchiya et al. propose the Quantum-like Qualia hypothesis, treating qualia as observables affected by measurement. Andersen's Maps of Meaning theory defines consciousness as a byproduct of goal prioritization.
Front Psychol
April 22, 2025
Aldo Aguirre-Camacho
Mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can be conceptually integrated by bridging ancient contemplative wisdom with modern cognitive theories of psychopathology. The commentary argues that mindfulness practices enhance CBT by addressing underlying cognitive processes, such as attentional bias and rumination, which are central to mental disorders. This integration offers a more comprehensive framework for understanding and treating psychopathology, suggesting that combining these approaches may improve therapeutic outcomes by targeting both symptom-focused and process-oriented mechanisms.
Front Psychol
January 21, 2025
Javier García-campayo, Jesus Montero-Marin, Roberto Aristegui
Contemplative neuroscience, which studies meditation, yoga, and related practices, is gaining acceptance in Western psychology and psychiatry, fulfilling a vision of earlier pioneers. A special issue on this topic includes nine papers. One clinical study found that neither semantic nor sensory priming improved outcomes of a self-compassion meditation. Another found that online mindfulness reduced state paranoia in individuals with high positive schizotypy but not trait paranoia. EEG research on Tibetan meditators showed concentrative meditation produced more neural changes than analytical meditation. A study on mindfulness and daily stress found that, except for nonreacting, mindfulness was positively associated with perceived stress.
Front Psychol
February 26, 2024
Christopher Gutland, Sucharit Katyal, Kelin Li et al.
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Front Psychol
January 16, 2024
Gillie Gabay, Douglas A. MacDonald, Melanie Gillespie Rosen
This editorial introduces a collection of papers on methods and applications in theoretical and philosophical psychology, specifically focusing on research methods used to study consciousness. It discusses various approaches and perspectives for investigating consciousness within the field.
Front Psychol
November 21, 2023
David Rail, Andrew Selby
Consciousness has five invariant structural features: experiencing space in three dimensions, integrating past, present, and future into a unified Now, combining information from different senses, relating to objects in the world with awareness, and a pre-reflective sense of a unique self. These features arise from a more fundamental process called symmetry-based modeling, rooted in Kant's idea that the mind imposes structure on experience and Cassirer's notion that a mathematical group underlies that structure. To account for intentionality and the five symmetries, a dual quaternion operator is needed. This operator unifies symmetry and intentionality into a new concept, symintentry, which is proposed as the original form of symmetry, offering fresh understanding of consciousness.
Front Psychol
November 15, 2022
Tomáš Marvan, Michal Polák
This commentary critiques neurocentrist identity theory and neuro-phenomenal typing, responding to Manzotti's arguments about the boundaries and location of consciousness. It examines how identity theories define consciousness, questioning their assumptions and implications. The author argues that neurocentrist approaches, which equate consciousness with brain processes, face conceptual difficulties when accounting for the phenomenal character of experience. The commentary suggests that alternative frameworks may better address the relationship between neural activity and conscious experience.
Front Psychol
June 29, 2026
Understanding consciousness requires integrating insights from philosophy, physics, neuroscience, computational modeling, behavioral science, and clinical studies. This editorial introduces a research topic that collected 12 articles from 33 authors to bridge gaps across these disciplines. The authors argue that progress has been made in measuring neural networks, formalizing principles, and quantifying subjective experience, but integrating these multi-dimensional insights across levels of analysis remains a central challenge. Rather than pursuing a single unified framework, the collection aims to advance multi-levelled understanding by presenting diverse approaches that currently shape consciousness science.
Front Psychol
May 21, 2026
A new theory, the Theory of Psychic Quanta (TPQ), proposes that consciousness arises not from brain activity alone but from a universal non-local psychic field. The brain acts as a biophysical interface that anchors quantized informational units, or quanta, to create individual experience. At death, the quantum disanchors and rejoins the field. The theory integrates elements of panpsychism, Orchestrated Objective Reduction, and Integrated Information Theory, predicting neural correlates like gamma synchronization. It offers explanations for phenomena such as near-death experiences, past-life memories, and non-local emotional communication, and aims to resolve the hard problem of consciousness by positing a dual ontology of physical and psychic domains.
Front Psychol
April 10, 2026
Zen meditation, practiced by monks with an average of 7.53 years of experience, improves cognitive control and reduces cognitive conflict in brain regions including the lateral and medial prefrontal cortices, compared to non-meditators. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a Stroop task followed by meditation, the study found that skilled monks showed better responses and reduced conflict-related brain activity. Conflict tasks typically activate the central executive network and suppress the default mode network, but here the expected inverse relationship between these networks was not strong; instead, connectivity analyses indicated suppression within default-mode-network regions. The neural mechanisms underlying Zen meditation's benefits remain partly elusive.
Front Psychol
March 18, 2026
This editorial argues that phenomenology, yogic practices, and Buddhist meditation offer valuable perspectives for deepening the psychological understanding of consciousness. It suggests that these contemplative and philosophical traditions provide methods and insights that can enrich empirical research on consciousness, moving beyond purely cognitive or neuroscientific approaches. The piece calls for integrating these first-person, experiential approaches with third-person scientific methods to achieve a more comprehensive study of conscious experience.
Front Psychol
September 15, 2025
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and lucid dreams (LDs) are often debated as possibly being the same or different types of experience. After compiling a list of features associated with each, the authors conclude that neither previously proposed features nor how people interpret the experience can reliably tell them apart. They argue that the key feature defining an OBE should be disembodiment—the sense of existing without a physical body—regardless of other aspects. This criterion, supported by first-person reports, helps distinguish OBEs from related experiences like lucid dreams.
Front Psychol
June 12, 2025
This special issue presents diverse perspectives on non-human consciousness, arguing that it should be understood as a graded, multidimensional phenomenon rather than a single trait. Lacalli proposes that consciousness and agency may have distinct evolutionary origins, with conscious experience possibly preceding full agency. Other contributions examine methodological approaches, including a dimensional model that balances empirical caution with ethical responsibility, and a behavioral matrix for profiling consciousness across species using variables like volition and self-direction. The volume rejects anthropocentric benchmarks and advocates for pluralistic, animal-centered approaches that recognize consciousness as a dynamic integration of cognitive, affective, and perceptual processes shaped by evolution.
Front Psychol
May 14, 2025
The author argues that the Hard Problem of Consciousness—explaining why neural activity is accompanied by subjective experience—may be framed on questionable grounds because it takes space for granted as an objective, independent substrate. Space, the author contends, is itself a perceptual construct within consciousness, analogous to the quale of redness. Thus, before explaining how qualia arise from brain activity, one must first explain space itself, which the author calls the Harder Problem of Consciousness. The piece explores the possibility that space emerges from light rather than containing it, and suggests that if space is a phenomenal construct, then consciousness is not something that exists within space but rather space exists within consciousness. The author concludes that this deepens the challenge of understanding qualia.
Front Psychol
April 2, 2025
Consciousness research spans perception, cognition, selfhood, sleep, dreaming, emotion, and empathy, covering healthy states like meditation and pathological conditions such as epilepsy and minimally conscious states. Despite decades of work, the nature and mechanisms of consciousness remain unclear, with unresolved debates over phenomenal versus access consciousness, the self, and graded versus all-or-none processing. Methodological challenges include measuring awareness and isolating neural correlates. This Research Topic collects recent contributions addressing these issues. One introduced the Awareness Atlas, a self-report scale assessing behavioral, cognitive, and affective manifestations of consciousness. Another applied the Perceptual Awareness Scale to an online discrimination task, finding evidence for gradual conscious content and that the gap between subjective experience and objective discrimination narrows with age.
Front Psychol
June 20, 2024
Consciousness is increasingly viewed as a multidimensional rather than a single phenomenon. This narrative review explains what dimensionality means in consciousness science, compares several theoretical proposals, and identifies key unresolved issues: how to select and aggregate the dimensions, plus ethical questions. It is the first comprehensive overview of this specific aspect of consciousness research.
Front Psychol
June 6, 2023
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