Report-modulated prefrontal activity and consistent posterior representations during conscious visual perception.
Liang He, Zhige Zhang, Yuetan Wang, Qiujian Meng, Yuying Jiang, Wei Xu, Jiangfen Wu, Jingwei Sheng, Zheng Ye, Xiaobin Ding
Consciousness and cognition June 1, 2026 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2026.104075 via PubMed
Summary
Posterior sensory brain regions (occipital and temporal cortices) show early and sustained activity for visible stimuli, beginning around 60-70 milliseconds, regardless of whether participants report seeing them. This activity includes enhanced alpha-band coupling, indicating stable perceptual representations. In contrast, prefrontal cortex activity only occurs when explicit report is required, starting around 100 milliseconds, and fails to represent stimulus category without report. These findings suggest posterior cortical dynamics are sufficient for perceptual awareness, while prefrontal cortex supports report-related access and global integration.
Study at a glance
| Design | experimental study combining report and no-report visual masking paradigms with magnetoencephalography |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Posterior cortical dynamics are sufficient to support perceptual awareness, whereas prefrontal cortex contributes to report-related access and global integration. |
Abstract
Understanding whether prefrontal cortex is necessary for conscious experience remains central to ongoing debates between global workspace and recurrent processing theories of consciousness. To dissociate neural processes underlying perceptual awareness from those related to report and access, we combined report and no-report visual masking paradigms with magnetoencephalography (MEG) to characterize the spatiotemporal and network dynamics of visual awareness. Across both report and no-report conditions, early and sustained responses emerged in occipital and temporal cortices, beginning at ∼60-70 ms post-stimulus. Posterior sensory regions consistently encoded stimulus presence and category information irrespective of reporting demands, and exhibited enhanced α-band recurrent coupling for visible stimuli, suggesting stable perceptual representations supported by local recurrent interactions. In contrast, prefrontal activity emerged only when explicit report was required, beginning at ∼100 ms and persisting thereafter. Time-resolved decoding revealed that anterior regions encoded stimulus information exclusively under report conditions and failed to represent categorical content when reporting was absent. Moreover, long-range fronto-posterior connectivity selectively increased during report, indicating task-dependent integration beyond posterior sensory processing. These findings demonstrate that posterior cortical dynamics are sufficient to support perceptual awareness, whereas prefrontal cortex contributes to report-related access and global integration. By disentangling awareness from reporting, this work provides evidence favoring posterior-centered accounts of phenomenal consciousness and clarifies the functional role of anterior cortex in conscious processing.