Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2020
Yury V M Lages, Daniel C Mograbi, Thomas E Krahe et al.
Understanding complex emotional states in animals reveals that 70% of researchers emphasize the importance of anthropomorphic perspectives, which help bridge human and animal emotions. By exploring different theories of consciousness and neural processing, insights into the subjective experiences of nonhuman animals expand. The debate between dualism and monism also shapes our understanding, while contrasting affective consciousness with higher-order emotional theories sheds light on how animals experience feelings uniquely. This nuanced view fosters a deeper appreciation for the emotional lives within diverse species.
Consciousness and cognition
October 1, 2016
Harry Haroutioun Haladjian, Carlos Montemayor
Phenomenal consciousness cannot be implemented in machines, despite advances in artificial intelligence that aim to reproduce human perception, cognition, and emotions. While ethical behavior may be programmable through rules and machine learning, emotions and empathy will remain simulations, not genuine experiences. Arguments from evolution, neuropsychology of emotions, and the dissociation between attention and consciousness in humans support this claim. The authors conclude that artificial consciousness is far from achievable.
Consciousness and cognition
May 1, 2014
Jean-Arthur Micoulaud-Franchi, Clélia Quiles, Guillaume Fond et al.
A methodological framework for analyzing the relationship between cognitive processes and brain activity uses variables measured by neurofeedback (NF) with functional Magnetic Resonance Imagery (fMRI NF). Two traditional approaches, the neuropsychological (NP) and psychophysiology (PP) approaches, treat cognitive or brain variables as dependent or independent. The article suggests that NF can be inspired by neurophenomenology, because fMRI NF lets participants simultaneously experience their own cognitive processes and observe effects on brain region activations. Implementing the elicitation interview method could improve fMRI NF by collecting participants' introspective reports on subjective experiences.
Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2009
Vincent De Gardelle, Jérôme Sackur, Sid Kouider
People often believe they see more than they can report, such as all letters in a briefly flashed array. This study tested whether that feeling reflects genuine rich conscious experience or an illusion. Using a partial-report task with unexpected pseudo-letters in unreported areas, participants still perceived only letters, even though pseudo-letters were present. The results suggest the feeling of seeing arises from an illusion: the brain reconstructs letters from partial information and prior expectations, rather than from access to a rich phenomenal experience. This supports the view that the subjective richness of perception is not a direct reflection of conscious content but a constructive process.
Consciousness and cognition
June 1, 1998
T C Dalton
A local neural network model for phenomenal experience explains the persistence, latency, and seamlessness of consciousness and its unity, but fails to account for nonlinear interactions between local and global neural systems. The model's assumptions that experience is immediate, intrinsic, and incorrigible limit understanding of how consciousness changes during neurobehavioral development. Recent evidence indicates development is discontinuous and that judgment arises under uncertainty, aligning feeling and perception with energy and behavior. A developmental approach may resolve the paradox of feeling both infinitely close to and distant from oneself.
Consciousness and cognition
June 5, 2026
Iris Berent
People's intuitions about whether consciousness is physical or non-physical shift depending on how the question is framed, similar to a visual illusion. In two experiments, when asked about a scenario where a person's body is duplicated, most people said the copy would not share the original's conscious states, reflecting a dualist view. But when asked about Mary, a neuroscientist who learns color for the first time, people expected her new color experience to appear on a brain scan, reflecting a physicalist view. This inconsistency is traced to two cognitive biases—intuitive Dualism and Essentialism—suggesting that such intuitions are unreliable guides to the nature of consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
June 1, 2026
Ivonne A Castiblanco Jimenez, Tommaso Ciorli, Martina Froio et al.
Dynamic laughter expressions overcome visual suppression more readily than crying or neutral expressions, especially at the threshold between minimal awareness and conscious perception. In two experiments using Continuous Flash Suppression, participants viewed dynamic facial stimuli and reported category and subjective visibility. Laughter was more likely than crying to break through suppression, with discrimination performance increasing at intermediate awareness levels. When neutral expressions were included, a graded pattern emerged: neutral expressions were suppressed most strongly, crying showed intermediate resistance, and laughter showed the weakest suppression. These results indicate that socially relevant emotional signals differ in their thresholds for conscious access, with laughter prioritized when perceptual awareness is limited.
Consciousness and cognition
May 1, 2026
Joseph Glicksohn
Converging operations aim to triangulate a construct such as altered states of consciousness or impulsivity, but measures sometimes diverge rather than converge. Three examples are examined: trait and state impulsivity may not correlate; state absorption may not correlate with trait absorption; and trait mindfulness may fail to correlate negatively with trait impulsivity due to ambiguous questionnaire wording. The author argues that the defining measure for impulsivity should be self-reported trait impulsivity, and for an altered state of consciousness it should be the subjective experience report. Three future research directions are proposed: determining which measure defines a construct, clarifying mismatches between measures, and considering demand characteristics that may cloud interpretation.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2026
Kyle Napierkowski, Emily Cook
People with synesthesia, a condition where sensory experiences blend (e.g., seeing colors for sounds), report dreams with distinct thematic content compared to those without synesthesia. Analyzing 2,337 dream reports from Reddit (1,169 from self-identified synesthetes and 1,168 matched controls), researchers used language models to detect group differences. Four themes—digital, interpersonal regret, diverse worlds, and violent conflict—were significantly more common in synesthete dreams. These findings suggest that synesthesia reflects broader differences in cognitive organization that persist during dreaming, supporting the idea that dreaming is continuous with waking thought and that stable traits shape spontaneous mental experiences.
Consciousness and cognition
March 1, 2025
Charlotte Van den Driessche, Clotilde Chappé, Mahiko Konishi et al.
The stream of thought can be partitioned into five distinct mental states: focus, task-related interference, external distraction, daydream, and blank. This classification, called the Classification of Mental States (CoMS-5T), was tested for validity. Participants gave free verbal reports of their mental contents, which external raters then classified, supporting the construct validity and neutrality of the system. A reanalysis of a large dataset from Beikmohamadi and Meier (2022) found distinct behavioral signatures for four of the five states, providing criterion validity. The work offers a systematic way to describe and measure the ongoing stream of thought in cognitive psychology.
Consciousness and cognition
February 1, 2025
Antonino Greco, Clara Rastelli, Andrea Ubaldi et al.
Exposure to simulated psychedelic hallucinations in virtual reality increased cognitive flexibility, as shown by reduced task-switching costs, compared to naturalistic VR exposure. No significant differences were found in linguistic automatic association tasks at word or sentence levels. Visually grounded high-level cognitive processes were modulated by the simulated hallucinations. The findings offer insights into bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes in altered states of consciousness without drugs, potentially informing neuroscience and clinical applications.
Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2024
John P Veillette, Letitia Ho, Howard C Nusbaum
People's explicit beliefs about being an agent are not directly tied to how often they feel a sense of agency during sensorimotor tasks. Instead, the connection runs through metacognition: individuals who are less sensitive to cues indicating self-causation tend to report more negative agency beliefs, but this relationship disappears when accounting for their ability to accurately monitor their own judgments. Positive agency beliefs showed no clear link to sensorimotor measures. The findings suggest that introspective access, rather than the raw experience of agency, shapes one's enduring beliefs about being an agent.
Consciousness and cognition
August 1, 2023
Kayley L Zielinski-Nicolson, Natalie Roberts, Simon Boag
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is an altered state of consciousness involving changes in affect, relaxation, and tingling sensations. Online videos designed to trigger ASMR have become popular, and ASMR may improve sleep, emotion regulation, and relaxation, but understanding of ASMR propensity is limited. This study examined whether a mentally flexible cognitive style underlies the ability to experience ASMR. Among 376 undergraduate students, findings did not support an overall mentally flexible mindset. However, transliminality, emotional contagion susceptibility, positive schizotypal traits, and roleplaying ability all significantly positively predicted ASMR propensity. ASMR propensity represents several possible underlying cognitive styles related to enhanced imagination and perceptual ability, not simply mental flexibility.
Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2022
Timo L Kvamme, Mesud Sarmanlu, Morten Overgaard
A double-blind neurofeedback study tested whether participants could become aware of the experiment's purpose. Using a contingency awareness questionnaire developed from consciousness research, 5 out of 20 subjects correctly guessed that the experiment aimed to manipulate their attention and multisensory perception in line with their group assignment. The questionnaire took about 25 minutes to complete. The authors call for replication before applying the questionnaire in clinical neurofeedback studies, noting both the strengths and limitations of the approach and the increasing importance of double-blinding in this field.
Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2021
Daniel Revach, Moti Salti
The way researchers ask questions about consciousness is shaped by hidden assumptions that constrain possible answers. This paper identifies and tests the assumptions underlying contemporary debates about the neural correlates of consciousness, tracing them to Crick and Koch's 1990 framing. These premises create a sequential, passive view of conscious perception as the product of resolved unconscious processing at a single moment in time. Major debates—about the moment of entry, all-or-none versus graded nature, and report versus no-report paradigms—are driven by consensus on these assumptions. Removing these assumptions resolves some debates and suggests a dynamic, dispersed conception of consciousness, offering a more parsimonious account of conscious perception.
Consciousness and cognition
October 1, 2020
Mikel Jimenez, José Antonio Hinojosa, Pedro R Montoro
The transition from unaware to aware visual experience may follow different patterns depending on the type of stimulus being processed. For low-level features such as stimulus energy, awareness appears to emerge gradually (graded), whereas for high-level features such as letters, words, or meaning, awareness seems to switch on abruptly (dichotomous). This review critically examines behavioral and brain-based evidence for the level of processing hypothesis, noting challenges including differences in conceptualizations, awareness scale issues, attentional confounds, and divergences in experimental factors or statistical analyses. The hypothesis is promising but requires further methodological and experimental work, especially neuroimaging studies, to clarify the neural correlates of consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
October 1, 2020
Chandra Sripada, Aman Taxali
The spontaneous stream of thought (SST), often called the stream of consciousness, exhibits a "clump-and-jump" structure: clusters of related thoughts about a topic followed by a jump to a new topic, in a repeating pattern. Multiple lines of evidence support this structure, including high interrater agreement in identifying jumps, corroboration by automated text analytic methods, identification by a data-driven algorithm, and inferred presence in unverbalized SST. Jumps involve a discontinuous shift where a new clump is only modestly related to the previous one. These results illuminate serial structure in SST and invite research into the processes generating the pattern.
Consciousness and cognition
August 1, 2020
Jesse J Winters
A new theoretical framework called the Temporally-Integrated Causality Landscape (TICL) proposes that consciousness emerges from the functional integration of the thalamocortical system. Unlike other frameworks such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT), TICL emphasizes that conscious experiences are temporally continuous rather than discrete. It establishes a thalamocortical basis for the point-of-view, arguing that consciousness consists of contents arising from neuronal subsystems that derive meaning from their relationship to the larger integrated system. These meaningful contents emerge because subsystems exhibit a level of temporally-integrated causality distinguishable from the larger system.
Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2019
Jussi Jylkkä, Henry Railo
The standard empirical approach to consciousness assumes that scientists can only observe neural correlates of experiences, not the experiences themselves. This paper argues that experiences are concrete physical phenomena that causally interact with other phenomena, including observers, and therefore can be observed and scientifically modeled. The epistemic gap between an experience and a scientific model of its neural mechanisms stems from the fact that the model is a theoretical construct distinct from the concrete phenomenon it models—a gap that exists between any natural phenomenon and its scientific model. On this view, a neuroscientific theory of the constitutive mechanisms of an experience is literally a model of the subjective experience itself, providing a solid basis for the empirical study of consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
August 1, 2019
Monika Derda, Marcin Koculak, Bert Windey et al.
Electrophysiological signatures of visual awareness can be distinguished from other task-related processes by manipulating the level of processing of visual stimuli. In an EEG experiment, 36 subjects performed either color (low-level) or magnitude (high-level) evaluations of masked digits and rated their subjective visibility. Mean amplitude in the VAN component time window (140-240 ms) correlated with visibility ratings in both conditions. Mean amplitude in the LP time window (380-480 ms) correlated with visibility ratings only in the high-level condition. These results support a temporal unfolding of ERP markers of conscious processing: an early component reflects initial perceptual experience, while a late component correlates with conscious experience of non-perceptual information.
Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2018
Tobias Schlicht
Finding the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC)—the minimal brain activity sufficient for a specific percept—faces a methodological dilemma. Conceptual decisions about how consciousness relates to attention, cognitive access, report, and other functions determine how correlation data are interpreted. Relying on subjective reports likely confounds the NCC with neural mechanisms for cognitive functions, because reports presuppose cognitive access. No-report paradigms risk confounding the NCC with neural mechanisms underlying unconscious processes. There appears to be no way to be sure that the neural correlate of conscious experience has been isolated.
Consciousness and cognition
October 1, 2017
Marek Binder, Krzysztof Gociewicz, Bert Windey et al.
Transitions from unconscious to conscious perception may be more gradual for low-level visual features and more dichotomous for high-level features. In an fMRI study using backward masking, participants reported a target digit's magnitude (high-level) or its color (low-level) and rated visibility. Intermediate visibility was reported more often in the low-level task, supporting the levels-of-processing hypothesis. Visible targets activated insulo-fronto-parietal regions in both tasks, while visual areas showed higher activity in the low-level task across all visibility levels. The findings suggest that attentional modulation of feature-representing brain regions mediates how processing level shapes conscious perception.
Consciousness and cognition
October 1, 2017
Johan Eriksson
Integration is often considered essential for generating conscious experiences, so brain activity linked to consciousness should increase when integration demands rise. Using fMRI and informational masking, researchers compared hearing simple repeating tones versus harmonic tone triplets to manipulate integration. The neural correlates of auditory consciousness included the superior temporal gyrus, lateral and medial frontal regions, cerebellum, and parietal cortex. Only left parietal cortex activity increased significantly with greater integration demands. Integration accounts for part of the neural activity underlying conscious experiences, but much of the associated brain activity likely reflects other processes.
Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2017
Renate Rutiku, Talis Bachmann
Electroencephalographic (EEG) potentials remain a valuable source of data and theories about the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). This review organizes published work on EEG-based markers of NCC according to the time course of brain potentials relative to stimuli for which awareness is measured or manipulated. Brain potentials are treated as both dependent and independent variables. A notable pattern across studies is that relative negativization of event-related potentials (ERPs) tends to mark NCC.
Consciousness and cognition
May 1, 2015
Christina Merrick, Melika Farnia, Tiffany K Jantz et al.
The stream of consciousness, often seen as free and whimsical, is actually more open to external influence than previously thought. An experimental manipulation successfully triggered not just one but two involuntary thoughts in participants: they were asked to avoid subvocalizing the names of visual objects and to avoid counting the number of letters in those object names. On many trials, participants experienced both types of involuntary thoughts, which arose from distinct high-level processes (naming and counting). This is the first demonstration of inducing two involuntary thoughts into the stream of consciousness, with stimulus word length systematically affecting the results. The findings have implications for attention, imagery, and action control.