A new no-report paradigm reveals that face cells encode both consciously perceived and suppressed stimuli.
eLife November 11, 2020 Janis Karan Hesse, Doris Y Tsao
During binocular rivalry, a constant visual stimulus produces a changing conscious percept. A concern has been that brain activity measured during rivalry might reflect the act of reporting the percept rather than the percept itself. This study recorded single neurons from face patches in the inferotemporal cortex of macaques using a no-report paradigm, inferring the animal's conscious percept from its eye movements. Large proportions of inferotemporal neurons represented the conscious percept even without active report. On single trials, both the conscious percept and the suppressed stimulus could be decoded. These findings indicate that inferotemporal cortex contains a true neural correlate of consciousness, consisting of a population code where single cells multiplex representation of the conscious percept and the physical stimulus.