scholarly journals Can binocular rivalry reveal neural correlates of consciousness?

2014 ◽  
Vol 369 (1641) ◽  
pp. 20130211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randolph Blake ◽  
Jan Brascamp ◽  
David J. Heeger
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Causal Link ◽  
Neural Dynamics ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Neural Correlate ◽  
Neural Correlates Of Consciousness ◽  
Neural Correlate Of Consciousness

This essay critically examines the extent to which binocular rivalry can provide important clues about the neural correlates of conscious visual perception. Our ideas are presented within the framework of four questions about the use of rivalry for this purpose: (i) what constitutes an adequate comparison condition for gauging rivalry's impact on awareness, (ii) how can one distinguish abolished awareness from inattention, (iii) when one obtains unequivocal evidence for a causal link between a fluctuating measure of neural activity and fluctuating perceptual states during rivalry, will it generalize to other stimulus conditions and perceptual phenomena and (iv) does such evidence necessarily indicate that this neural activity constitutes a neural correlate of consciousness? While arriving at sceptical answers to these four questions, the essay nonetheless offers some ideas about how a more nuanced utilization of binocular rivalry may still provide fundamental insights about neural dynamics, and glimpses of at least some of the ingredients comprising neural correlates of consciousness, including those involved in perceptual decision-making.

scholarly journals The search for the NCC: Progress and challenges

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Lepauvre ◽  
Lucia Melloni
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Neural Correlate ◽  
Neural Correlates Of Consciousness ◽  
Consciousness Studies ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Tremendous Amount ◽  
20Th Anniversary ◽  
Neural Correlate Of Consciousness

Twenty years ago, Thomas Metzinger published the book "The Neural Correlates of Consciousness" amassing the state of knowledge in the field of consciousness studies at the time from philosophical and empirical perspectives. On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of this impactful publication, we review the progress the field has made since then and the important methodological challenges it faces. A tremendous number of empirical studies have been conducted, which has led to the identification of many candidate neural correlates of consciousness. Yet, this tremendous amount of work has not unraveled a consensual account of consciousness as of now. Many questions, some already raised twenty years ago, remain unanswered, and an enormous proliferation of theories sharply contrasts with the scarcity of compelling data and methodological challenges. The contrastive method, the foundational method used to study the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), has also been called into question. And while awareness in the community of its shortcomings is widespread, few concrete attempts have been made to go beyond it and/or to revise existing theories. We propose several methodological shifts that we believe may help to advance the quest of the NCC program, while remaining uncommitted to any specific theory: (1) the currently prevalent “contrastive method” should lose its monopoly in favor of methods that attempt to explain the phenomenology of experience; (2) experimental data should be shared in centralized, multi-methods databases, transcending the limitations of individual experiments by granting granularity and power to generalize findings and “distill” the NCC proper; (3) the explanatory power of theories should be directly pitted against each other to overcome the non-productive fractioning of the field into insular camps seeking confirmatory evidence for their theories. We predict these innovations might enable the field to progress towards the goal of explaining consciousness.

scholarly journals Transient neuronal suppression for exploitation of new sensory evidence

2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell Shinn ◽  
Daeyeol Lee ◽  
John D. Murray ◽  
Hyojung Seo
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Temporal Integration ◽  
Motor Preparation ◽  
Stimulus Onset ◽  
Frontal Eye Field ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Behavioral Studies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Sensory Evidence

AbstractIn noisy but stationary environments, decisions should be based on the temporal integration of sequentially sampled evidence. This strategy has been supported by many behavioral studies and is qualitatively consistent with neural activity in multiple brain areas. By contrast, decision-making in the face of non-stationary sensory evidence remains poorly understood. Here, we trained monkeys to identify and respond via saccade to the dominant color of a dynamically refreshed bicolor patch that becomes informative after a variable delay. Animals’ behavioral responses were briefly suppressed after evidence changes, and many neurons in the frontal eye field displayed a corresponding dip in activity at this time, similar to that frequently observed after stimulus onset but sensitive to stimulus strength. Generalized drift-diffusion models revealed consistency of behavior and neural activity with brief suppression of motor output, but not with pausing or resetting of evidence accumulation. These results suggest that momentary arrest of motor preparation is important for dynamic perceptual decision making.

scholarly journals Population-wide distributions of neural activity during perceptual decision-making

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 ◽  
pp. 156-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrien Wohrer ◽  
Mark D. Humphries ◽  
Christian K. Machens
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Perceptual Decision

scholarly journals The Temporally-Integrated Causality Landscape: Reconciling Neuroscientific Theories With the Phenomenology of Consciousness

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse J. Winters
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Phenomenal Consciousness ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Neural Correlate ◽  
Resonance Theory ◽  
Thalamocortical System ◽  
Integrated Information Theory ◽  
Neural Correlate Of Consciousness

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of neuroscientific theories of consciousness. These include theories which explicitly point to EM fields, notably Operational Architectonics and, more recently, the General Resonance Theory. In phenomenological terms, human consciousness is a unified composition of contents. These contents are specific and meaningful, and they exist from a subjective point of view. Human conscious experience is temporally continuous, limited in content, and coherent. Based upon those phenomenal observations, pre-existing theories of consciousness, and a large body of experimental evidence, I derived the Temporally-Integrated Causality Landscape (TICL). In brief, the TICL proposes that the neural correlate of consciousness is a structure of temporally integrated causality occurring over a large portion of the thalamocortical system. This structure is composed of a large, integrated set of neuronal elements (the System), which contains some subsystems, defined as having a higher level of temporally-integrated causality than the System as a whole. Each Subsystem exists from the point of view of the System, in the form of meaningful content. In this article, I review the TICL and consider the importance of EM forces as a mechanism of neural causality. I compare the fundamentals of TICL to those of several other neuroscientific theories. Using five major characteristics of phenomenal consciousness as a standard, I compare the basic tenets of Integrated Information Theory, Global Neuronal Workspace, General Resonance Theory, Operational Architectonics, and the Temporo-spatial Theory of Consciousness with the framework of the TICL. While the literature concerned with these theories tends to focus on different lines of evidence, there are fundamental areas of agreement. This means that, in time, it may be possible for many of them to converge upon the truth. In this analysis, I conclude that a primary distinction which divides these theories is the feature of spatial and temporal nesting. Interestingly, this distinction does not separate along the fault line between theories explicitly concerned with EM fields and those which are not. I believe that reconciliation is possible, at least in principle, among those theories that recognize the following: just as the contents of consciousness are distinctions within consciousness, the neural correlates of conscious content should be distinguishable from but fall within the spatial and temporal boundaries of the full neural correlates of consciousness.

Binocular rivalry and emotion: Implications for neural correlates of consciousness and emotional biases in conscious perception

Cortex ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 120 ◽  
pp. 539-555
Author(s):  
María Hernández-Lorca ◽  
Kristian Sandberg ◽  
Dominique Kessel ◽  
Uxía Fernández-Folgueiras ◽  
Morten Overgaard ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Conscious Perception ◽  
Neural Correlates Of Consciousness

scholarly journals Age-dependency in binocular rivalry is reflected by exclusive percepts, not mixed percepts

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elahe Arani ◽  
Raymond van Ee ◽  
Richard van Wezel
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Binocular Rivalry ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
The Other ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Determining Factors ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Neural Factors ◽  
Inhibitory Interactions

AbstractSome aspects of decision-making are known to decline with normal aging. One of the known perceptual decision-making processes which is vastly studied is binocular rivalry. It is well-established that the older the person, the slower the perceptual dynamics. However, the underlying neurobiological cause is unknown. So, to understand how age affects visual decision-making, we investigated age-related changes in perception during binocular rivalry. In binocular rivalry, the image presented to one eye competes for perceptual dominance with the image presented to the other eye. Perception during binocular rivalry consists of alternations between exclusive percepts. However, frequently, mixed percepts with combinations of the two monocular images occur. The mixed percepts reflect a transition from the percept of one eye to the other but frequently the transitions do not complete the full cycle and the previous exclusive percept becomes dominant again. The transitional idiosyncrasy of mixed percepts has not been studied systematically in different age groups. Previously, we have found evidence for adaptation and noise, and not inhibition, as underlying neural factors that are related to age-dependent perceptual decisions. Based on those conclusions, we predict that mixed percepts/inhibitory interactions should not change with aging. Therefore, in an old and a young age group, we studied binocular rivalry dynamics considering both exclusive and mixed percepts by using two paradigms: percept-choice and percept-switch. We found a decrease in perceptual alternation Probability for older adults, although the rate of mixed percepts did not differ significantly compared to younger adults. Interestingly, the mixed percepts play a very similar transitional idiosyncrasy in our different age groups. Further analyses suggest that differences in synaptic depression, gain modulation at the input level, and/or slower execution of motor commands are not the determining factors to explain these findings. We then argue that changes in perceptual decisions at an older age are the result of changes in neural adaptation and noise.

scholarly journals Systems of Oscillators Designed for a Specific Conscious Percept

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 73-88
Author(s):  
Pavel Kraikivski
Keyword(s):  
Dynamical System ◽  
Mathematical Formulation ◽  
Distance Matrix ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Neural Dynamics ◽  
Neural Correlates Of Consciousness ◽  
Oscillatory Processes

As put forward by neuroscientists, the mechanisms of consciousness can be elucidated by revealing correlations between neural dynamics and specific conscious percepts. Recently, I have elaborated on the mathematical formulation for a system of processes that are mutually connected to be isomorphic to a conscious percept of a point in space. Importantly, in such a system, any process can be derived through all other processes that form its complement, or “interpretation.” To generate such a solution, I am proposing a dynamical system of oscillators coupled in a manner to preserve the properties of a percept. Specifically, I crafted a dynamical system that retains the mutual relationships among processes, forming an operational map isomorphic to a distance matrix that mimics a percept of space-like properties. The study and results pave a novel way to analyze the dynamics of neural-like (oscillatory) processes with a purpose of extracting the information relevant to specific conscious percepts, which will facilitate the search for neural correlates of consciousness.

scholarly journals Slow drift of neural activity as a signature of impulsivity in macaque visual and prefrontal cortex

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin R. Cowley ◽  
Adam C. Snyder ◽  
Katerina Acar ◽  
Ryan C. Williamson ◽  
Byron M. Yu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Internal State ◽  
Sensory Stimulus ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Population Activity ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Slow Drift ◽  
Sensory Evidence

AbstractAn animal’s decision depends not only on incoming sensory evidence but also on its fluctuating internal state. This internal state is a product of cognitive factors, such as fatigue, motivation, and arousal, but it is unclear how these factors influence the neural processes that encode the sensory stimulus and form a decision. We discovered that, over the timescale of tens of minutes during a perceptual decision-making task, animals slowly shifted their likelihood of reporting stimulus changes. They did this unprompted by task conditions. We recorded neural population activity from visual area V4 as well as prefrontal cortex, and found that the activity of both areas slowly drifted together with the behavioral fluctuations. We reasoned that such slow fluctuations in behavior could either be due to slow changes in how the sensory stimulus is processed or due to a process that acts independently of sensory processing. By analyzing the recorded activity in conjunction with models of perceptual decision-making, we found evidence for the slow drift in neural activity acting as an impulsivity signal, overriding sensory evidence to dictate the final decision. Overall, this work uncovers an internal state embedded in the population activity across multiple brain areas, hidden from typical trial-averaged analyses and revealed only when considering the passage of time within each experimental session. Knowledge of this cognitive factor was critical in elucidating how sensory signals and the internal state together contribute to the decision-making process.

scholarly journals Evidence against perfect integration of sensory information during perceptual decision making

2016 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 915-930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Carland ◽  
Encarni Marcos ◽  
David Thura ◽  
Paul Cisek
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Temporal Integration ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Pass Filter ◽  
Low Pass Filter ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Low Pass

Perceptual decision making is often modeled as perfect integration of sequential sensory samples until the accumulated total reaches a fixed decision bound. In that view, the buildup of neural activity during perceptual decision making is attributed to temporal integration. However, an alternative explanation is that sensory estimates are computed quickly with a low-pass filter and combined with a growing signal reflecting the urgency to respond and it is the latter that is primarily responsible for neural activity buildup. These models are difficult to distinguish empirically because they make similar predictions for tasks in which sensory information is constant within a trial, as in most previous studies. Here we presented subjects with a variant of the classic constant-coherence motion discrimination (CMD) task in which we inserted brief motion pulses. We examined the effect of these pulses on reaction times (RTs) in two conditions: 1) when the CMD trials were blocked and subjects responded quickly and 2) when the same CMD trials were interleaved among trials of a variable-motion coherence task that motivated slower decisions. In the blocked condition, early pulses had a strong effect on RTs but late pulses did not, consistent with both models. However, when subjects slowed their decision policy in the interleaved condition, later pulses now became effective while early pulses lost their efficacy. This last result contradicts models based on perfect integration of sensory evidence and implies that motion signals are processed with a strong leak, equivalent to a low-pass filter with a short time constant.

scholarly journals Neural Correlates of Evidence and Urgency During Human Perceptual Decision-Making in Dynamically Changing Conditions

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (10) ◽  
pp. 5471-5483
Author(s):  
Y Yau ◽  
M Dadar ◽  
M Taylor ◽  
Y Zeighami ◽  
L K Fellows ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Primate Research ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Current models of decision-making assume that the brain gradually accumulates evidence and drifts toward a threshold that, once crossed, results in a choice selection. These models have been especially successful in primate research; however, transposing them to human fMRI paradigms has proved it to be challenging. Here, we exploit the face-selective visual system and test whether decoded emotional facial features from multivariate fMRI signals during a dynamic perceptual decision-making task are related to the parameters of computational models of decision-making. We show that trial-by-trial variations in the pattern of neural activity in the fusiform gyrus reflect facial emotional information and modulate drift rates during deliberation. We also observed an inverse-urgency signal based in the caudate nucleus that was independent of sensory information but appeared to slow decisions, particularly when information in the task was ambiguous. Taken together, our results characterize how decision parameters from a computational model (i.e., drift rate and urgency signal) are involved in perceptual decision-making and reflected in the activity of the human brain.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document