Trends in cognitive sciences
July 1, 2010
Sid Kouider, Vincent De Gardelle, Jérôme Sackur et al.
477 citations
Current theories distinguish phenomenal consciousness (rich experience) from access consciousness (limited reportable content). The authors argue that evidence for phenomenal consciousness without access is weak, often confusing unconscious contents or illusory richness with genuine phenomenal experience. They propose a refined account where access operates across a hierarchy of representational levels, with partial awareness allowing independent access to lower and higher levels. This reframing of dissociable forms of consciousness into dissociable levels of access offers a more parsimonious explanation of existing evidence, and the illusion of rich phenomenology can be studied through testable cognitive mechanisms.
Trends in cognitive sciences
September 1, 2014
Ned Block
125 citations
A new technique suggests that people can consciously perceive more items at once than can be held in visual working memory. The method exploits unattended 'ensemble properties' that can be detected without reducing working memory capacity, offering a way to study phenomenal consciousness beyond memory limits.
Trends in cognitive sciences
June 1, 1998
M Kurthen, T Grunwald, C E Elger
20 citations
The explanatory gap between brain processes and phenomenal consciousness may be resolvable if consciousness is understood as a non-intrinsic, description-dependent property. The author argues that neither current neuroscience nor philosophy alone can bridge this gap, but that new neuroscientific descriptions could change the features of consciousness itself, making the gap disappear. Neuroscientists should continue studying neural correlates of consciousness rather than trying to refute the gap argument.
Trends in cognitive sciences
March 12, 2025
Thomas Andrillon, Antoine Lutz, Jennifer Windt et al.
14 citations
Moments during wakefulness that seem empty of any reportable thought, called mind blanking (MB), are not simply gaps in experience but distinct mental states with their own characteristics. This review maps MB by examining how people report it, its brain activity, and its links to related phenomena such as meditation and sleep. The authors propose that ongoing experience varies in richness, and contentless events represent a diverse category of mental states. They argue that recognizing MB as a reportable mental category is essential for a full understanding of how the mind works during wakefulness.
Trends in cognitive sciences
June 1, 2021
Benjamin Baird, Stephen LaBerge, Giulio Tononi
13 citations
Lucid dreamers can use eye movements to report on their dream content in real time during REM sleep, challenging the long-held belief that dreamers are completely isolated from the outside world. Sensory input is not entirely suppressed during sleep. A recent study by Konkoly et al. demonstrates that experimenters can question lucid dreamers during ongoing dreams and explores the feasibility of more extended two-way communication during lucid REM sleep dreaming.
Trends in cognitive sciences
October 1, 2023
Kevin Berryman, Sara W Lazar, Jakob Hohwy
11 citations
Mindfulness meditation has both positive and negative effects on moral functioning, distributed across multiple dimensions of moral cognition and behavior. A multifactor construct that assesses outcomes across several aspects of morality reveals that contemplative practices do not uniformly improve morality; instead, they produce a mix of beneficial and detrimental influences on different moral actions. The study provides an empirically rigorous investigation into the impact of mindfulness on morality, showing that the effects are complex and not captured by unidimensional measures.
Trends in cognitive sciences
May 15, 2025
Matthew D Lieberman
10 citations
Subjective conscious experience arises from effortless interpretations that feel like perceived facts, called p-interpretations, which are inherently idiosyncratic and integrate past and expected future moments into the present. Differential neural synchrony between groups suggests that parts of gestalt cortex, including the inferior parietal lobule and posterior temporal cortex, along with posterior medial cortex, track these p-interpretations. This differential synchrony may reflect each person's preexisting non-sensory representations—such as expectations, memories, and motivations—being integrated with sensory inputs to produce unique, meaning-infused immediate experiences across the stream of consciousness.
Trends in cognitive sciences
December 17, 2025
Liad Mudrik, Nathan Faivre, Michael Pitts et al.
5 citations
A major controversy in consciousness science divides sensory and cognitive theories. Reexamining Block's 1995 distinction between phenomenal consciousness (P) and access consciousness (A), the authors argue that P and A are not two different types of consciousness but two necessary conditions for consciousness. This conceptual shift helps resolve unresolved questions about neural mechanisms, functions of consciousness, and its relationship with attention. The proposal motivates selective unification across different classes of theories.
Trends in cognitive sciences
July 3, 2025
Andrew M. Haun, Giulio Tononi
5 citations
Visual experience is unfathomably rich, not sparse. Seeing involves three levels: high-level object and scene categorizations, mid-level feature groupings, and a fundamental spatial field of spots and their relations. Seeing objects requires seeing the groupings that compose them, and seeing groupings requires seeing the spatial field that grounds them. Even the basic feeling of spatial extendedness implies rich phenomenal structure. Much of what we see cannot be used, reported, or remembered, yet we see it.