Recent neuroscientific research has advanced our understanding of consciousness, yet the connection between specific qualitative aspects of consciousness, known as "qualia," and particular brain regions or networks remains elusive. Traditional methods that rely on verbal descriptions from participants pose challenges in neuroimaging studies. To address this, our group has introduced a novel "qualia structure" paradigm that leverages exhaustive, structural, and relational comparisons among qualia instead of verbal reports. In this study, we present the fMRI dataset that captures relational similarity judgments among two out of nine color qualia per trial from 35 participants. This dataset also includes a "no-report" condition in half of the trials to assess the impact of overt reporting. Additionally, each participant's color discriminability was evaluated with a hue test conducted outside the scanner. Our data offer valuable insights into the brain functions associated with color qualia and contribute to a deeper understanding of the neural foundations of consciousness.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04511-0 | DOI Listing |
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
March 2025
School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia.
Examination of the subjective qualitative aspects of an experience, or "qualia" in short, is a fundamental and core aspect of consciousness research. How can we characterize the particular quality of redness, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Data
March 2025
Institute for Quantum Life Science, National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology, Chiba, Japan.
Recent neuroscientific research has advanced our understanding of consciousness, yet the connection between specific qualitative aspects of consciousness, known as "qualia," and particular brain regions or networks remains elusive. Traditional methods that rely on verbal descriptions from participants pose challenges in neuroimaging studies. To address this, our group has introduced a novel "qualia structure" paradigm that leverages exhaustive, structural, and relational comparisons among qualia instead of verbal reports.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Rep
July 2024
Graduate School of Arts and Science, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the General Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), have shown remarkable performance in various cognitive tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these models have the ability to accurately infer human perceptual representations. Previous research has addressed this question by quantifying correlations between similarity response patterns of humans and LLMs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiosystems
October 2023
Mechanical Engineering Department, Fukuoka University, Japan. Electronic address:
Qualia have traditionally been considered difficult to measure objectively, but with the recent spread of fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and other techniques, various experimental efforts have been made. In this paper, focusing on the qualia for color, we created 6 colors with different RGB values for reference colors of RED, light GREEN, BLUE, YELLOW, and PURPLE, and showed them to 306 subjects. For example, for RED and 5 generated colors, we asked them, "Choose a color that you feel is RED," and asked them to choose.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Psychol
June 2023
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States.
How do brains create all our different colors, pains, and other conscious qualities? These various qualia are the most essential aspects of consciousness. Yet standard neuroscience (primarily based on synaptic information processing) has not found the synaptic-firing codes, sometimes described as the "spike code," to account for how these qualia arise and how they unite to form complex perceptions, emotions, . Nor is it clear how to get from these abstract codes to the qualia we experience.
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