Editorial: Methodological issues in consciousness research, volume II.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The study of consciousness spans a vast array of domains, including perceptual awareness, cognition and metacognition, executive control, selfhood, sleep and dreaming, emotional competence, and empathy. It concerns both healthy states (e.g., meditation, aging, spiritual experiences) and pathological conditions (e.g., epilepsy, neglect syndromes, locked-in syndrome, minimally conscious states, anesthesia). Despite decades of interdisciplinary research, the fundamental nature and mechanisms of consciousness remain elusive (Dehaene et al., 2017;Seth & Bayne, 2022). Several key theoretical distinctions continue to fuel debate. For instance, the differentiation between phenomenal and access consciousness (Block, 1995), the pre-reflective (minimal) and the reflective (narrative) self (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008), or between graded and all-or-none processing (Overgaard et al., 2006) remain unsettled. Similarly, methodological controversies persist: how to best measure awareness, how to establish its absence, and how to isolate the neural correlates of consciousness (Mashour et al., 2020). Recent debates also highlight the limitations of current paradigms in distinguishing necessary from incidental neural correlates (Koch et al., 2016). This Research Topic gathered recent contributions that address these theoretical and methodological challenges from diverse perspectives.A core challenge in consciousness research is developing reliable measures that capture different levels and manifestations of awareness. Jia et al. (2024) introduce the Awareness Atlas, a novel selfreport scale aimed at assessing what they called the 'manifestations of consciousness', i.e., behavioral, cognitive, and affective effects of different levels of awareness. This approach emphasizes the practical implications of measuring consciousness beyond its theoretical construct, particularly in areas like meditation research and clinical interventions. Watanabe & Moriguchi (2024) contribute to the long-standing debate on graded versus all-or-none consciousness. By applying the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) to an online discrimination task in children and adults, they provide evidence supporting a gradual emergence of conscious content. Notably, their findings suggest that while age does not significantly alter the emergence of subjective awareness, the gap between subjective experience and objective discrimination narrows over time.