Consciousness and cognition
August 1, 2021
Piotr Szymanek
4 citations
The common view holds that a lucid dream begins when the dreamer realizes they are dreaming. This article argues that such realization can result from actual reasoning, not a mere epiphenomenon. It builds a Bayesian model of probabilistic reasoning that explains how a dreamer transitions to lucidity, considering their beliefs about what is generally probable or improbable and their openness to being in a dream. The model is defended against objections and offers an account of lucid dream initiation relevant for future research on dreaming.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2025
Dylan Ludwig
2 citations
A novel working hypothesis proposes that conscious experiences enable a variety of functional capacities that differ across psychological tasks, individuals, and species—a view called functional pluralism. Examining emotional processing, the paper consolidates evidence from vision science experiments (masking and suppression of emotional stimuli) and clinical research on Generalized Anxiety Disorder to compare unconscious and conscious emotional processes. Conscious experiences are argued to facilitate emotion-specific functions, including enhanced representation of fine-grained evaluative information, inhibition, and flexible responses, contrary to leading theories of consciousness that assume a single function.
Consciousness and cognition
August 1, 2023
Burak Erdeniz, Ege Tekgün, Bigna Lenggenhager et al.
2 citations
Most people experience dreams from a first-person perspective (82%) rather than a third-person perspective (18%). Regardless of perspective, dreamers typically perceive other dream characters within close peripersonal space—either 0–90 cm or 90–180 cm—rather than farther away (180–270 cm). Dream characters are most often seen from eye level (0° viewing angle) rather than above or below. The intensity of bodily self-consciousness in dreams is higher among those who habitually see other characters closer to their dream self. These findings provide a phenomenological account of spatial representation and felt presence of others in dreams, suggesting that peripersonal space coding and self-other distinction operate similarly in dreaming and waking states.
Consciousness and cognition
June 28, 2025
Jei-Yi Lu, Chih-Chieh Chang, Tzu-Ling Chang et al.
1 citation
Buddhist meditation practitioners show greater mental flexibility, measured by a new alpha brainwave transformation index, compared to nonpractitioners. Twenty-eight practitioners and 28 nonpractitioners completed an EEG neurofeedback task requiring them to voluntarily control the appearance and disappearance of a signal based on their alpha brainwave state. Practitioners had a significantly higher alpha transformation index, indicating better ability to switch between mental states, along with higher self-esteem, life satisfaction, and lower negative affect, after controlling for age and gender. The alpha transformation index also correlated positively with mindfulness levels and life satisfaction, suggesting mindfulness may enhance neural efficiency and mental flexibility.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2025
Keelan R Gorman, Aimee Wrightson-Hester, Michael Landman et al.
1 citation
A virtual reality (VR) environment where the angle of view changes with information complexity was tested with ten university students. The approach was feasible, and participants' first-person experiences, analyzed thematically, aligned most with Mansell's (2024) control theory perspective, and to a lesser degree with Integrated Information Theory and Global Workspace Theory. The findings suggest that VR can provide a dynamic and ecologically valid method for gathering evidence about theories of consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2024
Yangyang Sun, Keshuo Wang, Xingjie Liang et al.
1 citation
Temporal attention—prioritizing information based on timing—can occur without conscious awareness. Using a temporal cueing paradigm with masking, visible and invisible cues both triggered temporal attention, though visible cues produced stronger effects. EEG recordings showed that both cue types evoked the contingent negative variation (CNV) component, with smaller amplitudes for invisible cues; the P300 component followed a similar pattern. Hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling indicated that both conscious and unconscious temporal attention involve non-perceptual decision-making processes. These findings both support and challenge the Global Workspace Theory: consciousness enhances attention through global broadcasting, whereas unconscious attention may rely on more localized neural networks.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2024
Franz Roman Schmid, Moritz F Kriegleder
1 citation
Predictive processing models, often proposed as a unified theory of perception, action, and cognition, fall short when applied to specific phenomena like hallucinations. Using Charles-Bonnet Syndrome as a case study, the authors argue that the current predictive processing account—specifically the strong prior hypothesis—fails to capture essential characteristics of stimulus-independent perception. This omission has critical phenomenological implications. To address the explanatory gap, the authors propose incorporating reality monitoring into the strong prior hypothesis, enabling it to account for nonveridical perceptual experiences beyond just veridical percepts.
Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2023
Charlene L M Lam, Tom J Barry, Jenny Yiend et al.
1 citation
Extinction learning, a process central to exposure therapy, may work differently when a feared stimulus is perceived without conscious awareness. In a threat conditioning experiment, healthy participants' pupils dilated more during extinction trials when they were unaware of the conditioned stimulus than when they were aware of it, with a moderate effect size. After fear was reinstated, recovery of fear was greater for the stimulus that had been suppressed from awareness during extinction. The findings suggest that extinction with reduced visual awareness weakens the modulation of fear responses compared to extinction with full perceptual awareness.
Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2014
Richard J Stevenson, Mehmet Mahmut
1 citation
Visual experience contains more information than can later be recalled, and this study tested whether the same distinction exists for smell. In two experiments, participants rated odor features (e.g., how banana-like) both while smelling and after the odor was removed. On some trials the ratings matched; on others they differed. Each odor was presented twice: for half the odors both trials were identical, for the rest one trial differed. The after-smelling rating was always the same for each odor, allowing reliability to be measured. Incongruent profiles were least reliable. Attempting to access specific odor features after the odor is gone is harder if those features were not attended during smelling, suggesting more information is available during smelling than can be accessed afterward.
Consciousness and cognition
December 1, 2009
John Beeckmans
1 citation
The core neural bases for visual phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness may reside in anatomically separate regions, with phenomenal consciousness located early in the visual cortex where detailed chromatic information is available. During perception, cognitive access to this rich chromatic information is mediated through mereologically superordinate concepts that characterize integrated semantic and quantitative properties of complex visual percepts. These concepts contain much less information than the particulars they characterize, implying that the information in phenomenal consciousness greatly exceeds that in accompanying access consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
June 1, 2026
Liang He, Zhige Zhang, Yuetan Wang et al.
The neural basis of conscious visual experience was investigated by combining magnetoencephalography with report and no-report masking paradigms. Early and sustained neural responses in occipital and temporal cortices began at about 60-70 milliseconds after a stimulus appeared, encoding stimulus presence and category regardless of whether participants reported what they saw. These posterior regions also showed enhanced alpha-band recurrent coupling for visible stimuli. Prefrontal cortex activity emerged only when explicit report was required, starting at about 100 milliseconds, and did not represent categorical content when reporting was absent. Long-range fronto-posterior connectivity increased selectively during report. The findings indicate that posterior cortical dynamics are sufficient to support perceptual awareness, while prefrontal cortex contributes to report-related access and global integration, supporting posterior-centered accounts of phenomenal consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
March 1, 2026
Alexander A Fingelkurts, Andrew A Fingelkurts
The three core aspects of selfhood—'Self', 'Me', and 'I'—show moderate-to-high stability within individuals over time, measured by the functional integrity of brain networks on repeat quantitative EEG testing. Their overall configuration, or relative expression pattern, is exceptionally reliable. The duration between assessments, participants' age, and the presence of somatic or psychopathological conditions did not affect these stability measures. The results suggest that these aspects of selfhood and their configuration exhibit trait-like properties, remaining stable across time, age, and health conditions.
Consciousness and cognition
March 1, 2026
Peter A White
Consciousness is not a property of brain processes themselves, only of the information those processes handle. The paper argues three points: first, the fact that information is conscious must be kept separate from the content of that information; second, in an information-processing brain, only information—not the operations on it—can be conscious, as illustrated by voluntary actions like verbal reports; third, access consciousness is merely access, and adding 'consciousness' to it changes nothing—a system identical to the human brain but lacking conscious information would function identically. Conscious experience requires a generative mechanism, but none has been proposed.
Consciousness and cognition
February 3, 2026
Chris Percy, Gautam Agarwal
A deliberately simple artificial neural network model can implement functional binding—combining micro-units of information for cognitive tasks—but fails to achieve phenomenal binding, the integration of micro-information into the unified, macro-scale conscious experience typical of human phenomenology. The model's failure highlights a key challenge for theories of consciousness: maintaining a distinction between unconscious and conscious processing while achieving phenomenal binding. Several established theories, including Integrated Information Theory, Orch-OR, and Conscious Electromagnetic Information Theory, map onto possible solution structures based on which parts of the model they elaborate or reject. Each proposed solution requires further development to fully account for phenomenal binding.
Consciousness and cognition
January 18, 2026
Marieta Pehlivanova, Rense Lange, Bruce Greyson et al.
Two scales measuring the phenomenology of near-death experiences—the 16-item NDE Scale and the 20-item NDE-C—were compared in 705 self-identified experiencers. The scales correlate nearly perfectly (r = 0.98), indicating they measure the same underlying construct. However, Rasch analysis revealed problems with the NDE-C's category structure and five novel items. The original NDE Scale's item hierarchy replicated across samples, showing long-term stability. Based on parsimony and psychometric evidence, the original NDE Scale with Rasch scoring and a validated cut-off of 7 (out of 32) is recommended for future research.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2026
Matthias Forstmann, Pascal Burgmer
A new 24-item questionnaire, the Nature of Mind Scale (NOMS), reliably measures eight distinct philosophical views about the relationship between mind and body, including substance dualism, interactionism, panpsychism, idealism, reductive and non-reductive physicalism, mystical monism, and neutral monism. Across four studies with 1,074 participants, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed the eight-factor structure. Participants most strongly endorsed interactionism, non-reductive physicalism, and mystical monism, and least supported idealism. The scale showed good model fit, measurement invariance, and convergent validity with existing measures. Construct validity was supported by expected links with religiosity, free will beliefs, cognitive style, personality, and afterlife beliefs.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2026
Guillaume Pepin, Hélène Lœvenbruck, Alan Chauvin et al.
Hallucinations and involuntary mental imagery share many features but differ in key ways. In a survey of 1,951 French-speaking adults, involuntary mental imagery occurred more often than hallucinations and was rated as more vivid, emotionally positive, and self-generated. Hallucinations, by contrast, caused greater distress and were perceived as coming from outside the self. Moderate to strong correlations between the two on most dimensions support the idea of a shared experiential continuum, though differences in agency and controllability challenge existing cognitive models of self-monitoring. Refining these distinctions may improve early detection and prevention of distressing internal experiences.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2026
Manuela Kirberg, Jennifer Windt
Dreaming and mind wandering share features of spontaneous thought, but their precise relationship remains unclear. Bizarreness—unusual features of experience—has traditionally been seen as unique to dreams, though some propose it exists on a continuum where dreaming is an intensified form of mind wandering. Analyzing 379 spontaneous reports from the same participants in a naturalistic setting, the findings show that both dreaming and waking mind wandering have unique bizarreness profiles with similarities and differences. The comparison between the two changes depending on the type, subtype, and content of bizarreness measured. Thus, dreams cannot simply be described as intensified mind wandering; a more nuanced approach with specific measures is needed.
Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2025
Inés Abalo-Rodríguez, Ana P Pinheiro
Hallucination research is an interdisciplinary field that combines psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article outlines key conceptual issues, such as how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations and whether they form a single construct. It reviews experimental paradigms that measure enduring hallucinatory tendencies versus those capturing hallucinations in real time, along with rating instruments like confidence scales and the phenomenological approach focusing on first-person experience. A checklist of variables—including sensory modality, context, cognitive style, affective state, and cultural background—is provided for researchers to consider before designing studies.
Consciousness and cognition
July 1, 2025
Gulshan Kumar, Safoora Naaz, Nahida Jabin et al.
Dream recall is more frequent after REM sleep than N2 sleep. During dream recall, EEG beta activity increases, functional connectivity within the default mode network strengthens, and the medial frontal cortex activates, regardless of sleep stage. Auditory stimulation during sleep can influence the emotional content of dreams, suggesting that targeted memory reactivation may be possible. These findings help clarify how conscious experience arises during sleep.
Consciousness and cognition
July 1, 2025
Michael Pauen
A widely held view claims that phenomenal experience cannot be explained by neural mechanisms due to an incompatibility between phenomenal and neuroscientific knowledge. This paper argues against that view in three steps. First, it shows that two key assumptions behind the explanatory gap argument are unfounded, making the problem solvable with standard scientific methods. Second, it hypothesizes that affective pain can be captured in functional terms if the function is cognitive rather than behavioral: feeling affective pain is feeling an urge to avoid. Third, it presents empirical evidence supporting this claim and shows how the functional description helps identify neural mechanisms underlying affective pain. This serves as a proof of principle that phenomenal experience can be explained in objective neuroscientific terms.
Consciousness and cognition
May 30, 2025
Ludwig Crespin
Dreaming consciousness is not fundamentally different from waking consciousness. The claim that dreams lack cognitive access or executive control is false because dream recall itself proves the dreamer noticed the experience, and dream reports show dreamers rationally assess situations and self-regulate within dreams. However, dreamers have reduced extended consciousness with limited access to their waking autobiographical self, which creates the retrospective illusion that the dream ego lacks rational control. The autobiographical self that regulates and recollects the dream is not the same as the waking one. Dreams occurring during sleep are still conscious experiences in their own right.
Consciousness and cognition
March 1, 2025
Gal R Chen, Yuval Harris, Ran R Hassin
People differ reliably in how quickly non-conscious visual stimuli enter awareness, a trait linked to later cognitive and emotional processes. Two experiments tested whether this prioritization speed relates to noticing changes in a change blindness task. In the first experiment (97 participants), faster prioritization correlated with better change detection across multiple measures. A preregistered replication (99 participants) confirmed this correlation and showed it was not explained by variability in other perceptual-decision tasks. The findings suggest that the speed of becoming aware of stimuli is tightly connected to conscious experiences in other situations.
Consciousness and cognition
November 1, 2024
Peter Ulric Tse
Epistemological conceptions of information, based on decoding extrinsic inputs to become informed, are contrasted with ontological conceptions based on intrinsic states independent of external factors. Ontological views, such as those underlying integrated information theory or panpsychism, cannot account for consciousness. In animal brains, the only known conscious systems, decoding extrinsic inputs is central to creating consciousness and its contents. Only a specific subset of decodings should realize consciousness, because it evolved to create an evaluative experience of what is intrinsically true about the world and body, used in a perception-action cycle that affords choices for behavior to accomplish goals.
Consciousness and cognition
July 1, 2024
John Balch, Rachel Raider, Joni Keith et al.
People who have more dissociative experiences during the day also tend to have more nightmares, lucid dreams, and beliefs in paranormal phenomena, and they take longer to fall asleep. The coherence and perspective of dreams—specifically how stable and first-person the dreamed self feels—predicts about 26% of the variation in dissociative symptoms. These findings suggest that REM sleep intruding into waking consciousness may contribute to some dissociative experiences. The results come from 219 volunteers who completed surveys including the Dissociative Experiences Scale, plus dream reports and sleep measures from a subgroup. The authors propose that dream content stability could be a useful indicator of dissociative tendencies and that treating nightmare distress might help reduce dissociation.