Identifying content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness.

Summary

Perceptual vividness is not just a subjective experience; it has distinct neural signatures in the brain. Analyzing data from 200 participants across two studies, findings reveal that awareness and visibility ratings correspond to content-invariant brain activity patterns in visual, parietal, and frontal areas. This suggests that the way our brain encodes perceptual vividness mirrors how it represents magnitude in other cognitive domains, such as numbers or rewards. These insights deepen our understanding of consciousness and its neural underpinnings.

Abstract

Some conscious experiences are more vivid than others. Although perceptual vividness is a key component of human consciousness, how variation in this magnitude property is registered by the human brain is unknown. A striking feature of neural codes for magnitude in other psychological domains, such as number or reward, is that the magnitude property is represented independently of its sensory features. To test whether perceptual vividness also covaries with neural codes that are invariant to sensory content, we reanalyzed existing magnetoencephalography and functional MRI data from two distinct studies which quantified perceptual vividness via subjective ratings of awareness and visibility. Using representational similarity and decoding analyses, we find evidence for content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness distributed across visual, parietal, and frontal cortices. Our findings indicate that the neural correlates of subjective vividness may share similar properties to magnitude codes in other cognitive domains.

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