The involvement of the human prefrontal cortex in the emergence of visual awareness.
eLife January 24, 2024 Zepeng Fang, Yuanyuan Dang, Zhipei Ling et al. 16 citations
Saccadic latency is significantly shorter when people are aware of a visual stimulus than when they are unaware. Local field potential recordings from the prefrontal cortex of six patients show early awareness-related activity, including event-related potentials and high-gamma activity, between 200 and 300 milliseconds. The neural activity in the prefrontal cortex can reliably decode the awareness state from an early stage, and the neural pattern changes dynamically rather than remaining stable during awareness. Enhanced dynamic functional connectivity through low-frequency phase modulation between the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions in early awareness trials may explain the mechanism of conscious access. These results indicate that the prefrontal cortex is critically involved in the emergence of awareness.