Conscious perception

…it possible to discriminate between a conscious and unconscious state of visual perception in birds? An interesting phenomenon to answer this question is flash suppression: when an image is presented to one eye, it is suppressed from conscious perception as soon as a different image is flashed to the second eye. Although this topic has been well studied in mammals, little is known about birds. Thus, here we present a behavioral study to investigate flash suppression in pigeons (Columba livia). While the animals are head-fixated, a different

The tight relationship between attention and conscious perception has been extensively researched in the past decades. However, whether attentional modulation extended to unconscious processes remained largely unknown, particularly when it came to abstract and high-level processing. I will talk about a recent study where we utilized the Stroop paradigm to show that task load gates unconscious semantic processing. In a series of psychophysical experiments, the unconscious word semantics influenced conscious task performance only under the low task load condition, but not the high task load cond

I will discuss the mechanisms that determine whether a weak visual stimulus will reach consciousness or not. If the stimulus is simple, early visual cortex acts as a relay station that sends the information to higher visual areas. If the stimulus arrives at a minimal strength, it will be stored in working memory and can be reported. However, during more complex visual perceptions, which for example depend on the segregation of a figure from the background, early visual cortex’ role goes beyond a simply relay. It now acts as a cognitive blackboard and conscious perception depends on it. Our res

The cognitive neuroscience of conscious perception has seen considerable growth over the past few decades. Confirming an influential hypothesis driven by earlier studies of neuropsychological patients, we have found that the lateral and polar prefrontal cortices play important causal roles in the generation of subjective experiences. However, this basic empirical finding has been hotly contested by researchers with different theoretical commitments, and the differences are at times difficult to resolve. To address the controversies, I suggest one alternative venue may be to look for clinical a