Journal of Vision
June 26, 2015
Yair Pinto, Simon van Gaal, Floris P. de Lange et al.
177 citations
Expectations speed up conscious perception. In four experiments using predictive cueing and continuous flash suppression, expected images entered awareness faster than neutral or unexpected ones. This effect was not due to response priming, stimulus associations, or attentional timing biases. Top-down expectations had a stronger influence when visual input was ambiguous, consistent with predictive processing accounts. The findings support the idea that conscious access depends on verifying perceptual predictions.
Neuropsychology Review
May 12, 2020
Edward H.F. de Haan, Paul M. Corballis, Steven A. Hillyard et al.
86 citations
Cutting the corpus callosum (split-brain) broadly disrupts functional integration across perception and attention, but some processes like action control remain unified. The key unresolved question is whether split-brain patients have split or unified consciousness. Current evidence is insufficient to decide, and future studies may need to consider intermediate conceptualizations beyond a simple yes or no.
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
January 30, 2017
Yair Pinto, Annelinde R. E. Vandenbroucke, Marte Otten et al.
23 citations
Change blindness—the failure to notice unattended changes in a visual scene—has been taken as evidence that conscious perception requires spatial attention. However, change blindness tasks introduce visual interference that forces reliance on working memory, which has limited capacity. Before such interference, a larger-capacity store called fragile memory exists. Two experiments show that minimizing spatial attention nearly eliminates visual working memory but leaves fragile memory largely intact. Furthermore, minimally attended fragile memory responses produce accurate metacognition, indicating that conscious memory persists with limited spatial attention. These findings suggest that both visual consciousness and memory can be supported by only minimal attention.
Journal of neuropsychology
March 1, 2021
Edward H F De Haan, Huibert Steven Scholte, Yair Pinto et al.
8 citations
The subjective feeling that consciousness is singular—that there is only one 'me'—may be an illusion created by the need to respond coherently to the environment. A review of neuropsychological conditions such as anosognosia, neglect, and split-brain, alongside psychiatric disorders and psychoactive drugs, suggests that perceptual, language, memory, attentional, and motor processes can operate largely in parallel without integration. The sense of unity, or 'Me-ness', arises only when an organism must produce a coherent response constrained by environmental affordances.
Cognitive neuroscience
January 1, 2021
Yair Pinto, Timo Stein
7 citations
The paper argues that the approach of setting aside the hard problem of consciousness—the question of why and how physical processes give rise to subjective experience—to focus only on measuring neural and functional correlates is not feasible. While some researchers advocate 'shut up and measure' as a pragmatic strategy, the authors contend that any data collection about consciousness necessarily involves an implicit or explicit stance on the hard problem itself. Thus, the hard problem cannot be bypassed through purely empirical methods.