More than words: can free reports adequately measure the richness of perception?

The question of the richness (or sparseness) of conscious experience has evoked ongoing debate and discussion. Claims for both richness and sparseness are supported by empirical data, yet they are often indirect, and alternative explanations have been put forward. Recently, it has been suggested that current experimental methods limit participants' responses, thereby preventing researchers from assessing the actual richness of perception.

A standardized framework to test event-based experiments.

The replication crisis in experimental psychology and neuroscience has received much attention recently. This has led to wide acceptance of measures to improve scientific practices, such as preregistration and registered reports. Less effort has been devoted to performing and reporting the results of systematic tests of the functioning of the experimental setup itself.

No evidence for unconscious initiation and following of arithmetic rules: A replication study.

The field of consciousness studies has yielded various-sometimes contradicting-accounts regarding the function of consciousness, ranging from denying it has such function to claiming that any high-level cognitive function requires consciousness. Empirical findings supporting both accounts were reported, yet some of them have been recently revisited based on failures to replicate. Here, we aimed at replicating a remarkable finding reported by Ric and Muller (2012); participants were able to follow an unseen instruction, integrate it with a subsequently presented pair of unseen digits, and accordingly either add the digits (resulting in a priming effect), or simply represent them.

Towards an interdisciplinary "science of the mind": A call for enhanced collaboration between philosophy and neuroscience.

In recent decades, the neuroscientific community has moved from describing the neural underpinnings of mental phenomena-as characterized by experimental psychology and philosophy of mind-to attempting to redefine those mental phenomena based on neural findings. Nowadays, many are intrigued by the idea that neuroscience might provide the "missing piece" that would allow philosophers (and, to an extent, psychologists, too) to make important advances, generating new means that these disciplines lack to close knowledge gaps and answer questions like "What is Free Will?" and "Do humans have it?." In this paper, we argue that instead of striving for neuroscience to replace philosophy in the ongoing quest to understanding human thought and behavior, more synergetic relations should be established, where neuroscience does not only inspire philosophy but also draws from it.

Taking consciousness for real: Increasing the ecological validity of the study of conscious vs. unconscious processes.

The study of consciousness has developed well-controlled, rigorous methods for manipulating and measuring consciousness. Yet, in the process, experimental paradigms grew farther away from everyday conscious and unconscious processes, which raises the concern of ecological validity. In this review, we suggest that the field can benefit from adopting a more ecological approach, akin to other fields of cognitive science.

Using virtual reality to induce multi-trial inattentional blindness despite trial-by-trial measures of awareness.

Unconscious processing has been widely examined using diverse and well-controlled methodologies. However, the extent to which these findings are relevant to real-life instances of information processing without awareness is limited. Here, we present a novel inattentional blindness (IB) paradigm in virtual reality (VR).

Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond.

Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness ('C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural organoids, and xenobot technology.

Awareness is needed for contextual effects in ambiguous object recognition.

Despite its centrality to human experience, the functional role of conscious awareness is not yet known. One hypothesis suggests that consciousness is necessary for allowing high-level information to refine low-level processing in a "top-down" manner. To test this hypothesis, in this work we examined whether consciousness is needed for integrating contextual information with sensory information during visual object recognition, a case of top-down processing that is automatic and ubiquitous to our daily visual experience.

Progressing, not regressing: A possible solution to the problem of regression to the mean in unconscious processing studies.

How convincing is current evidence for unconscious processing? Recently, a major criticism suggested that some, if not much, of this evidence might be explained by a mere statistical phenomenon: regression to the mean (RttM). Excluding participants based on an awareness assessment is a common practice in studies of unconscious processing, and this post hoc data selection might lead to false effects that are driven by RttM for aware participants wrongfully classified as unaware. Here, we examined this criticism using both simulations and data from 12 studies probing unconscious processing (35 effects overall).

Experiencing without knowing? Empirical evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access.

Can one have a phenomenal experience to which one does not have access? That is, can you experience something without knowing? The dissociation between phenomenal (P) and access (A) consciousness is widely debated. A major challenge to the supporters of this dissociation is the apparent inability to experimentally demonstrate that P-without-A consciousness exists; once participants report having a P-experience, they already have access to it. Thus, all previous empirical support for this dissociation is indirect.

What is the intention to move and when does it occur?

In 1983 Benjamin Libet and colleagues published a paper apparently challenging the view that the conscious intention to move precedes the brain's preparation for movement. The experiment initiated debates about the nature of intention, the neurophysiology of movement, and philosophical and legal understanding of free will and moral responsibility. Here we review the concept of "conscious intention" and attempts to measure its timing.

An adversarial collaboration protocol for testing contrasting predictions of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theory.

The relationship between conscious experience and brain activity has intrigued scientists and philosophers for centuries. In the last decades, several theories have suggested different accounts for these relationships. These theories have developed in parallel, with little to no cross-talk among them.

Prestimulus oscillatory brain activity interacts with evoked recurrent processing to facilitate conscious visual perception.

We investigated whether prestimulus alpha-band oscillatory activity and stimulus-elicited recurrent processing interact to facilitate conscious visual perception. Participants tried to perceive a visual stimulus that was perceptually masked through object substitution masking (OSM). We showed that attenuated prestimulus alpha power was associated with greater negative-polarity stimulus-evoked ERP activity that resembled the visual awareness negativity (VAN), previously argued to reflect recurrent processing related to conscious perception.

Neuroscientific Evidence for Processing Without Awareness.

The extent to which we are affected by perceptual input of which we are unaware is widely debated. By measuring neural responses to sensory stimulation, neuroscientific data could complement behavioral results with valuable evidence. Here we review neuroscientific findings of processing of high-level information, as well as interactions with attention and memory.

Free will without consciousness?

Findings demonstrating decision-related neural activity preceding volitional actions have dominated the discussion about how science can inform the free will debate. These discussions have largely ignored studies suggesting that decisions might be influenced or biased by various unconscious processes. If these effects are indeed real, do they render subjects' decisions less free or even unfree? Here, we argue that, while unconscious influences on decision-making do not threaten the existence of free will in general, they provide important information about limitations on freedom in specific circumstances.

The ConTraSt database for analysing and comparing empirical studies of consciousness theories.

Understanding how consciousness arises from neural activity remains one of the biggest challenges for neuroscience. Numerous theories have been proposed in recent years, each gaining independent empirical support. Currently, there is no comprehensive, quantitative and theory-neutral overview of the field that enables an evaluation of how theoretical frameworks interact with empirical research.

Same action, different meaning: neural substrates of action semantic meaning.

Voluntary actions are shaped by desired goals and internal intentions. Multiple factors, including the planning of subsequent actions and the expectation of sensory outcome, were shown to modulate kinetics and neural activity patterns associated with similar goal-directed actions. Notably, in many real-world tasks, actions can also vary across the semantic meaning they convey, although little is known about how semantic meaning modulates associated neurobehavioral measures.

The forest, the trees, or both? Hierarchy and interactions between gist and object processing during perception of real-world scenes.

The global-to-local theories of perception assume that the gist of a scene is computed early and automatically, whereas recognition of objects occurs at a later processing stage, requires attentional resources, and is primed by the representation of gist. To test these theoretical predictions, we investigated the processing hierarchy of gist- and object-recognition and their interaction in two experiments (total N = 60). Backward-masked images of real-world scenes were presented for a range of brief durations - between 8 ms and 100 ms, and participants performed either an object or a background classification task, in separate blocks.

Dimensions of Perception: 3D Real-Life Objects Are More Readily Detected Than Their 2D Images.

Most of our interactions with our environment involve manipulating real 3D objects. Accordingly, 3D objects seem to enjoy preferential processing compared with 2D images, for example, in capturing attention or being better remembered. But are they also more readily perceived? Thus far, the possibility of preferred detection for real 3D objects could not be empirically tested because suppression from awareness has been applied only to on-screen stimuli.