Trends in Cognitive Sciences
November 13, 2015
Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Melanie Wilke, Stefan Frässle et al.
567 citations
The search for the neural basis of consciousness has been biased by the requirement that subjects report their experiences. Recent no-report paradigms aim to study conscious experience without any report, dissociating neural activity that gives rise to consciousness from activity that enables reporting. The advantages and disadvantages of both report-based and no-report approaches are discussed, and the authors ask how combining these methods can bring us closer to understanding the true neural basis of consciousness.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Melanie Boly, Anil K. Seth, Melanie Wilke et al.
295 citations
Consciousness research over the last decade has advanced through evidence that fronto-parietal connectivity and top-down processes enable information to travel across distant cortical areas, and through numerous dissociations between consciousness and cognitive functions such as attention in humans. Mental imagery paradigms now allow identification of covert awareness in non-responsive subjects. In non-human animals, technological enhancements have clarified the roles of cortical areas and higher-order thalamus for consciousness, and progress has been made in understanding non-vertebrate cognition relevant to possible conscious states. Major advances have also occurred in theories of consciousness and their comparison with available evidence.
February 20, 2026
Ege Kingir, Melanie Wilke
preprint
To understand the neural mechanisms of visual consciousness, researchers must first develop perceptual report and no-report paradigms in humans that accurately reflect subjective experiences, then transfer these paradigms to animals for high-throughput electrophysiology and cell- or pathway-specific perturbations. This chapter reviews experimental approaches including visual illusions, visual masking, and bistable perception paradigms used to investigate conscious perception across species. The combined evidence from these approaches provides the most refined picture of how animals subjectively experience the visual world. Results from non-human primate studies concerning neural circuitry underlying visual consciousness disorders such as blindsight and spatial neglect are also presented.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
November 8, 2017
Johan F Storm, Melanie Boly, Adenauer G Casali et al.
The mind-body problem—how consciousness arises from brain processes—has long been considered a philosophical puzzle but is now being tackled empirically. This review describes progress since Crick and Koch (1998) proposed searching for the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). It covers content-specific NCCs, which link particular brain activity to specific experiences, and the full NCC, which supports entire conscious states. The authors discuss methodological advances for isolating conscious experience from enabling functions, suggest that reconsidering the frontal cortex's role may refine NCCs, advocate for objective brain-based measures of consciousness independent of sensory or executive processes, and show how animal studies reveal network phenomena relevant to consciousness mechanisms.