Psychophysiology
July 1, 2025
Kinga Ciupińska, Marcin Koculak, Michał Bola et al.
2 citations
Comparing brain signals for visual and auditory conscious awareness in the same people shows that early awareness negativity (VAN and AAN) relates to awareness in both senses, but late positivity (LP) relates to awareness only for vision. Visual components also reach consciousness faster than auditory ones. No correlations between modalities in perceptual thresholds or ERP latencies and amplitudes suggest visual and auditory awareness mechanisms are largely separate and modality-specific, not tracking consciousness independently of content.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 20, 2022
Marcin Koculak, Michał Wierzchoń
Complexity measures, especially those from Integrated Information Theory, have been useful for distinguishing different states of consciousness (e.g., awake versus asleep) but have rarely been applied to studying the specific content of conscious experience. This paper argues that investigating how complexity relates to what we are conscious of is essential for understanding the role of information-theoretic measures in consciousness research. The authors outline how conscious content could be experimentally operationalized and how basic testable hypotheses can be formulated without relying on the formal apparatus of IIT. Such an approach could improve understanding of which aspects of consciousness complexity captures and facilitate comparisons between different theories of consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
August 1, 2019
Monika Derda, Marcin Koculak, Bert Windey et al.
Electrophysiological signatures of visual awareness can be distinguished from other task-related processes by manipulating the level of processing of visual stimuli. In an EEG experiment, 36 subjects performed either color (low-level) or magnitude (high-level) evaluations of masked digits and rated their subjective visibility. Mean amplitude in the VAN component time window (140-240 ms) correlated with visibility ratings in both conditions. Mean amplitude in the LP time window (380-480 ms) correlated with visibility ratings only in the high-level condition. These results support a temporal unfolding of ERP markers of conscious processing: an early component reflects initial perceptual experience, while a late component correlates with conscious experience of non-perceptual information.
Consciousness and cognition
October 1, 2017
Marek Binder, Krzysztof Gociewicz, Bert Windey et al.
Transitions from unconscious to conscious perception may be more gradual for low-level visual features and more dichotomous for high-level features. In an fMRI study using backward masking, participants reported a target digit's magnitude (high-level) or its color (low-level) and rated visibility. Intermediate visibility was reported more often in the low-level task, supporting the levels-of-processing hypothesis. Visible targets activated insulo-fronto-parietal regions in both tasks, while visual areas showed higher activity in the low-level task across all visibility levels. The findings suggest that attentional modulation of feature-representing brain regions mediates how processing level shapes conscious perception.