Front Psychol
May 12, 2026
People often show a double bias when attributing consciousness to non-human systems. Non-human animals receive low attributions of consciousness despite behavioral and neurobiological evidence suggesting subjective experience, while disembodied AI systems like large language models receive elevated attributions of consciousness despite lacking sensory or bodily substrates. This asymmetry indicates that folk judgments are shaped more by observers' cue-weighting heuristics than by the intrinsic properties of the systems. The authors propose that multidimensional, non-hierarchical frameworks, such as Birch's model and the Pattern Theory of Self, can serve as diagnostic tools to study how evidence dimensions are weighted in attributional contexts, replacing a ladder of human-like capacities with a landscape of profiles across taxa and system types.
Front Psychol
April 29, 2026
The paper critically reviews quantum theories of consciousness, assessing their feasibility, philosophical sufficiency, and empirical testability. It argues that while such theories offer intriguing possibilities, they currently lack robust empirical support and face significant philosophical challenges, including issues of coherence and explanatory power. The review concludes that quantum approaches to consciousness remain speculative and insufficiently grounded in evidence, suggesting that more rigorous theoretical development and experimental testing are needed before they can be considered viable explanations.
Front Psychol
April 2, 2026
People who are more aware of internal bodily signals (interoceptive awareness) report better sleep and digestion, and this link is partly explained by having a balanced time perspective—an even orientation toward past, present, and future. The findings suggest that sensing the body helps regulate conscious experience not just through automatic bodily processes but also through how people think about time. This supports a model where bodily awareness and temporal orientation work together to maintain psychological and physical stability.
Front Psychol
March 30, 2026
Perception is not a passive reconstruction of external stimuli but emerges through active, embodied interaction with the environment, according to a theoretical integration of embodied cognition and artificial intelligence. Evidence from neuroscience, developmental psychology, autism research, and AI shows that perceptual meaning arises from lawful relations among bodily constraints, action, and environmental feedback. Recent AI models like embodied reinforcement learning and active inference treat perception as inseparable from action, using closed-loop, predictive systems. The paper argues that embodiment functions as a generative constraint enabling robust sensory cognition. It extends this framework to autism spectrum disorder, proposing that sensory differences reflect variations in embodied self-organization and predictive regulation rather than cognitive deficits. Embodied AI systems could serve as testbeds for exploring these perceptual mechanisms.
Front Psychol
March 20, 2026
Intuitions about consciousness are more accurate and reliable than previously assumed, as recent findings show that cases seeming to reveal counterintuitive dissociations between consciousness and functions can be explained by partial awareness. The authors argue that consciousness is a metacognitive model of internal representations, and intuitions about consciousness are metacognitive models of the relationship between internal representations and functions. This reframing explains their accuracy and reliability and links them to well-studied cognitive functions like confidence, target templates, attention modes, and awareness of absence.
Front Psychol
January 5, 2026
Quantitative psychology treats self-consciousness as a measurable attribute, using scales and causal models from a third-person perspective, but faces issues like contextual dependence and lack of natural units. Phenomenology, following Husserl, instead examines the pre-reflective, first-person dimension of self-consciousness that underlies all experience. It clarifies the meaning of measured scores by grounding them in lived experience, reframing contextual dependence as a feature rather than a limitation. The paper argues that phenomenology complements quantitative approaches by addressing meaning before causality, without dismissing the value of third-person analysis.
Front Psychol
November 25, 2025
The search for a single unifying theory or universal principle reflects a deep intuition that a singular essence—nondual awareness, or consciousness itself—underlies all experience. Contemplative traditions describe this awareness as free from mental constructs, uncaused, and relatively unchanging across experiences, metaphorically without birth or death. While scientific understanding of consciousness has grown exponentially, understanding nondual awareness remains elusive, with each generation contributing unique insights while repeating similar mistakes. The author previously distinguished nondual awareness from perceptual, affective, and cognitive contents, and from functions like attention and memory. This work sketches issues related to ontology, epistemics, participant reports, and experiment design in studying nondual awareness.
Front Psychol
May 30, 2025
A new framework for measuring consciousness is proposed, drawing on consciousness theories and engineering concepts like measurement workflow, problem space analysis, and observability. It introduces measurability criteria and applies them to various use cases, assessing whether current theories and technologies can measure consciousness attributes in those contexts. The framework is intended to help researchers and engineers determine the feasibility of developing a consciousness measurement system for specific applications.
Front Psychol
May 7, 2025
This collection of articles presents diverse perspectives on consciousness research, including new theories and methodological frameworks. Fink proposes direct neurophenomenal structuralism linking neural structures to experience without intermediate explanations. Josipovic argues conscious awareness does not require mental representations, highlighting non-dual awareness with an implicit-explicit gradient. Oblak et al. demonstrate personalized network models can incorporate qualitative phenomenology in clinical psychiatry. Tsuchiya et al. propose the Quantum-like Qualia hypothesis, treating qualia as observables affected by measurement. Andersen's Maps of Meaning theory defines consciousness as a byproduct of goal prioritization.
Front Psychol
April 22, 2025
Mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can be conceptually integrated by bridging ancient contemplative wisdom with modern cognitive theories of psychopathology. The commentary argues that mindfulness practices enhance CBT by addressing underlying cognitive processes, such as attentional bias and rumination, which are central to mental disorders. This integration offers a more comprehensive framework for understanding and treating psychopathology, suggesting that combining these approaches may improve therapeutic outcomes by targeting both symptom-focused and process-oriented mechanisms.
Front Psychol
January 21, 2025
Contemplative neuroscience, which studies meditation, yoga, and related practices, is gaining acceptance in Western psychology and psychiatry, fulfilling a vision of earlier pioneers. A special issue on this topic includes nine papers. One clinical study found that neither semantic nor sensory priming improved outcomes of a self-compassion meditation. Another found that online mindfulness reduced state paranoia in individuals with high positive schizotypy but not trait paranoia. EEG research on Tibetan meditators showed concentrative meditation produced more neural changes than analytical meditation. A study on mindfulness and daily stress found that, except for nonreacting, mindfulness was positively associated with perceived stress.
Front Psychol
February 26, 2024
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Front Psychol
January 16, 2024
This editorial introduces a collection of papers on methods and applications in theoretical and philosophical psychology, specifically focusing on research methods used to study consciousness. It discusses various approaches and perspectives for investigating consciousness within the field.
Front Psychol
November 21, 2023
Consciousness has five invariant structural features: experiencing space in three dimensions, integrating past, present, and future into a unified Now, combining information from different senses, relating to objects in the world with awareness, and a pre-reflective sense of a unique self. These features arise from a more fundamental process called symmetry-based modeling, rooted in Kant's idea that the mind imposes structure on experience and Cassirer's notion that a mathematical group underlies that structure. To account for intentionality and the five symmetries, a dual quaternion operator is needed. This operator unifies symmetry and intentionality into a new concept, symintentry, which is proposed as the original form of symmetry, offering fresh understanding of consciousness.
Front Psychol
November 15, 2022
This commentary critiques neurocentrist identity theory and neuro-phenomenal typing, responding to Manzotti's arguments about the boundaries and location of consciousness. It examines how identity theories define consciousness, questioning their assumptions and implications. The author argues that neurocentrist approaches, which equate consciousness with brain processes, face conceptual difficulties when accounting for the phenomenal character of experience. The commentary suggests that alternative frameworks may better address the relationship between neural activity and conscious experience.