A MULTIMODAL GENOMIC APPROACH TO CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE

Consciousness shapes how humans perceive, interpret, and respond to the world through the integration of sensory information and the monitoring of thoughts and decisions. Variation in these processes is increasingly recognised as contributing to resilience and vulnerability in mental health. However, both the biological basis of individual differences in conscious experience and their relationship to mental health remain poorly understood.
Here, we combine comprehensive phenotypic data with genetic profiles from a multisite cohort of more than 700 healthy adults recruited across several European countries. Participants completed a battery of metacognitive and perceptual tasks spanning visual, auditory, and associative memory domains, capturing individual differences in conscious experience, alongside detailed self-reported mental health and related psychometric measures. We examine how variation in conscious experience relates to mental health phenotypes and assess shared genetic liability using polygenic scores indexing general psychopathology within a genomic structural equation modelling framework. Building on this, we perform more granular polygenic profiling using scores derived from a broad panel of cognitive, behavioural, clinical, and neuroimaging traits to identify trait-specific genetic associations with individual measures of conscious experience, and examine how these associations correspond to variation in phenotypically matched measures within the cohort.
Preliminary analyses indicate that selected measures of inter-individual variation in consciousness-related task performance show structured associations with mental health measures and polygenic scores that differ across tasks. Together, these findings suggest that variation in certain aspects of conscious experience is linked to mental health phenotypes through partially shared biological liability.