Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
December 17, 2011
Jaan Aru, Talis Bachmann, Wolf Singer et al.
612 citations
Identifying the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) is a major goal in neuroscience, typically pursued by comparing brain activity when a person is conscious of a stimulus versus when they are not. This review argues that such contrastive analyses are problematic because they can capture not only the true NCC but also neural prerequisites for conscious processing and consequences that follow it. Previous findings may therefore be ambiguous. The authors propose experimental strategies to isolate the NCC from these confounds, aiming to refine the contrastive approach.
PLoS ONE
February 10, 2023
Lucia Melloni, Liad Mudrik, Michael Pitts et al.
106 citations
An adversarial collaboration between proponents of Global Neuronal Workspace and Integrated Information Theory devised and preregistered two experiments that test contrasting predictions about the location and timing of correlates of visual consciousness. Six theory-impartial laboratories will follow the study protocol using fMRI, M-EEG, and intracranial EEG, with built-in replications between labs and within datasets. The project aims to provide decisive evidence for or against the two theories and clarify the neural footprints of conscious visual perception, while modeling large-scale, collaborative, and open science practice.
Nature
June 1, 2025
Oscar Ferrante, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin et al.
94 citations
Different theories explain how subjective experience arises from brain activity. An open science adversarial collaboration directly juxtaposed integrated information theory (IIT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT). Human participants (n = 256) viewed suprathreshold stimuli for variable durations while neural activity was measured with fMRI, MEG, and intracranial EEG. Information about conscious content was found in visual, ventrotemporal, and inferior frontal cortex, with sustained responses in occipital and lateral temporal cortex reflecting stimulus duration, and content-specific synchronization between frontal and early visual areas. These results align with some predictions of IIT and GNWT but substantially challenge key tenets of both theories, including a lack of sustained posterior cortex synchronization for IIT and a lack of ignition at stimulus offset and limited prefrontal representation for GNWT.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
March 1, 2025
Liad Mudrik, Melanie Boly, Stanislas Dehaene et al.
68 citations
In a structured public debate at the 2022 meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, proponents of five major theories—Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, Integrated Information Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, and Predictive Processing—clarified their theories' core mechanisms, foundational premises, and what each theory aims to explain. The discussion revealed more controversy than agreement, particularly on the most basic questions: what consciousness is, how to identify conscious states, and what any adequate theory must account for. Addressing these foundational disagreements is essential for advancing the field and enabling meaningful comparison of competing theories.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 10, 2021
Itay Yaron, Lucia Melloni, Michael Pitts et al.
21 citations
preprint
A bird's-eye analysis of 412 experiments on the neuroscience of consciousness reveals that methodological choices alone can predict which of four leading theories a study will support, regardless of the actual findings. Most studies interpret their results after the fact rather than testing critical predictions in advance. This suggests that the field's theoretical commitments may be driven more by how experiments are designed than by the evidence itself. The authors provide an open-access website for further exploration of these trends.
Scientific data
May 23, 2025
Alia Seedat, Alex Lepauvre, Jay Jeschke et al.
5 citations
An intracranial EEG dataset was collected from 38 epilepsy patients across three research centers as part of an adversarial collaboration testing Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory. Participants viewed visual stimuli—faces, objects, letters, and false fonts—in three orientations and for three durations, performing a Go/No-Go target detection task. The dataset includes demographics, clinical information, electrode reconstructions, behavioral performance, and eye-tracking data, all converted to BIDS format. It is intended for reuse in consciousness science and vision neuroscience to investigate stimulus processing, target detection, and task-relevance.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
November 13, 2025
Yuranny Cabral-Calderin, Julio Hechavarria, Lucia Melloni
2 citations
Consciousness is not unique to humans; it likely exists in other animals and varies along a continuum shaped by evolution. To understand consciousness more fully, research should adopt a neuroethological perspective based on Tinbergen's four questions: mechanism, development, adaptive function, and evolutionary origin. This approach moves beyond studying only human adults and can help investigate consciousness in infants, non-human animals, and other entities. Adopting this broader view has important scientific, ethical, and societal implications.
September 2, 2025
Zefan Zheng, Robert Chis-Ciure, Peter Thestrup Waade et al.
1 citation
preprint
Consciousness science is fragmented, with theories operating orthogonally and accumulating anomalies. The principle of recurrency—functional and architectural feedback loops—offers a unifying scaffold. All theories tacitly invoke feedback loops and can be re-expressed along a single axis of recursion. Four nested levels (cellular, local inter-areal, global, and lateral) map onto state, phenomenal content, manipulative access, and experiential similarity, tying evolved anatomy to phenomenon. The phenomenal-versus-access distinction dissolves into a graded cascade where deeper recursion expands reportable variables. Recurrence is evolutionarily favored, rebutting feed-forward objections, while brain-body loops ground selfhood. Clinically, targeting recurrent pathways promises new biomarkers and alleviation in disorders of consciousness.
Scientific data
May 29, 2026
Ling Liu, Oscar Ferrante, Tara Ghafari et al.
A large-scale, multi-center dataset combines MEG, EEG, eye-tracking, and structural MRI recordings from 100 individuals (mean age 22.79, 54 female, all right-handed) across two research centers (UK and China). The data were collected through an adversarial collaboration between advocates of the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory and the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. Participants performed a non-speeded Go/No-Go target detection task with visual stimuli from four categories (faces, objects, letters, false fonts) at different orientations and durations (0.5, 1.0, 1.5 s) under various task conditions. The dataset follows the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) and includes extensive metadata to enhance reusability.
Scientific data
May 7, 2026
Aya Khalaf, David Richter, Yamil Vidal et al.
An adversarial collaboration between proponents of the Global Neuronal Workspace theory and the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness produced a functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset from 118 participants. Participants viewed faces, objects, letters, and false fonts presented at three orientations and three durations (0.5, 1.0, 1.5 seconds) while identifying infrequent targets. Two categories were task-relevant and two were task-irrelevant in each block. The simple design makes the data broadly reusable for testing predictions from other theories of consciousness and for examining visual processing. Anonymized data, quality reports, demographics, behavioral performance, and eye-tracking data are publicly accessible.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews
June 1, 2024
Robert Chis-Ciure, Lucia Melloni, Georg Northoff
A novel framework called the Measure Centrality Index (MCI) enables systematic comparison of consciousness theories by assessing how important a given empirical measure is for each theory. Applying the MCI to Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and Temporospatial Theory of Consciousness shows that direct comparisons are meaningful for measures such as Lempel-Ziv Complexity, Autocorrelation Window, and possibly Mutual Information, but problematic for anatomical and physiological neural correlates of consciousness because these measures carry different weight across theories. The approach addresses isolated theory evolution and confirmatory bias in consciousness science.
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 23, 2023
Oscar Ferrante, Urszula Gorska-Klimowska, Simon Henin et al.
preprint
An open science adversarial collaboration directly juxtaposed Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) by investigating neural correlates of visual experience. 256 human subjects viewed suprathreshold stimuli for variable durations while neural activity was measured with fMRI, MEG, and ECoG. Information about conscious content was found in visual, ventro-temporal, and inferior frontal cortex, with sustained responses in occipital and lateral temporal cortex reflecting stimulus duration, and content-specific synchronization between frontal and early visual areas.
Advances in Consciousness Research
June 17, 2015
Jaan Aru, Talis Bachmann, Wolf Singer et al.
Identifying the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) is considered a key step toward understanding consciousness. Typical experiments contrast conditions with and without conscious perception, but this contrast captures not only neural activity directly tied to conscious experience but also prerequisites and consequences of that perception. To isolate the true neural basis of conscious experience, researchers must disentangle the NCC from these confounding processes. This review discusses recent experimental developments and proposes new empirical approaches to more precisely isolate the neural activity underlying conscious perception.