Journal of cognitive neuroscience
August 15, 2002
Dan Lloyd
92 citations
Functional brain imaging and phenomenology can be combined to study human consciousness. Four preprocessed fMRI datasets from the National fMRI Data Center were reanalyzed: response competition, object representation, word reading, and spatial working memory. Phenomenology provided initial structures—phenomenal intentionality, superposition, and temporality—that guided empirical predictions. Multivariate analyses of 27 subjects revealed analogues of these structures, especially temporality. In a second approach, artificial neural networks were trained on 21 subjects to detect whether present experience contains past and future brain states; nets were successfully trained to extract aspects of relative past and future states compared to controls. The exploratory study concludes these neurophenomenological methods warrant further application.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
August 1, 2019
Anthony P Zanesco, Brandon G King, Chivon Powers et al.
40 citations
Improvements in perceptual discrimination from intensive meditation training can alter brain signals related to attention and perception, but only when the task difficulty is fixed rather than adjusted to match the person's improving ability. In two three-month meditation retreats, participants performed a continuous visual task while brain activity was recorded. When the target difficulty was held constant, training reduced declines in early sensory processing and shifted the timing of those brain signals. Changes in later processing stages correlated with better perceptual thresholds. No such brain changes occurred when task difficulty was increased to keep pace with participants' improving skill. The findings show that directed mental training can modify electrophysiological markers of attention and perception, depending on how task demands relate to the individual's capacity.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
November 1, 2024
Isaac N Treves, Kannammai Pichappan, Jude Hammoud et al.
35 citations
Greater trait mindfulness, measured by self-report scales, is consistently linked with reduced amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli, increased cortical thickness in frontal and insular regions, and decreased connectivity within the default-mode network, converging with findings from intervention studies and mindfulness experts. However, associations with EEG metrics and between-network resting-state fMRI remain inconclusive. The authors recommend larger samples, multivariate approaches, and careful reliability testing, urging a move away from simplistic explanations of mindfulness and brain function.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
September 1, 2023
Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Mel Slater et al.
13 citations
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) can be partially induced in a virtual reality setup. Seven healthy participants wore a VR headset and saw their virtual body from a ceiling viewpoint; in one condition their real movements were mirrored onto the virtual body, in the other they were not. Participants reported strong sensations of floating and being high up, but only weak to moderate feelings of being out of their body. Brain activity recorded with 128 electrodes showed that these subjective experiences were linked to increased delta and decreased alpha power, reduced theta complexity, and increased beta-2 connectivity, supporting the idea that delta activity plays a prominent role in certain conscious states.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
June 1, 2024
Łucja Doradzińska, Michał Bola
12 citations
Visual awareness negativity (VAN), an early brain response measured by EEG, is not an attention-independent marker of conscious visual perception. Reanalysis of data from 41 participants showed that VAN's amplitude in the early time window (140-200 msec) depended heavily on attention; the effect of awareness disappeared for neutral faces that were task-irrelevant distractors. In a later window (200-350 msec), VAN appeared across all conditions but was larger for fearful or task-relevant faces. These findings challenge the idea that VAN purely reflects phenomenal awareness, instead showing it is influenced by both stimulus saliency and task demands.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
May 14, 2025
Ruby M Potash, Sean D van Mil, Mar Estarellas et al.
7 citations
During an advanced concentrative absorption meditation called jhana, characterized by highly stable attention and mental absorption, the brain's nonoscillatory dynamics—captured by nonlinear connectivity metrics—distinguish the meditative state better than oscillatory synchrony. Combining attention-related phenomenological ratings with these nonlinear metrics improves the detection of the meditative state compared to using neural data alone. Deeper absorption states show an equalization of feedback and feedforward processes, suggesting a balance between internally and externally driven information processing. The findings, based on EEG recordings from a single meditator with over 20,000 hours of practice across 29 sessions, offer initial insights into the distinct neural dynamics of refined conscious states.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
May 27, 2026
Alejandro Chandia-Jorquera, Sean D van Mil, Mar Estarellas et al.
3 citations
Pure awareness, a state of minimal phenomenal experience, can be reliably studied through transcendental meditation. In 33 experienced TM practitioners compared to controls doing mental counting, TM produced significantly greater intensity and temporal variability of pure awareness, unrelated to years of practice. Using EEG and multivariate classification, a double dissociation emerged: temporal entropy and aperiodic dynamics best distinguished TM from counting, while low-frequency functional connectivity best distinguished TM from its own baseline. These differences reflected distributed neural patterns, not localized effects. TM showed little carryover into rest, unlike counting. The findings characterize pure awareness electrophysiologically and support neurophenomenology as a framework for studying minimal experience.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
May 30, 2024
Biyu J He
2 citations
The field of consciousness science has grown exponentially over the past five years, following three decades of foundational work by a small group of researchers. In June 2023, a three-day workshop funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation convened experts to assess the current state of the field and identify promising future research directions. The resulting Special Focus includes empirical and theoretical contributions from invited speakers. The author advocates for stronger connections between consciousness science and other cognitive neuroscience subdisciplines, arguing that modern neuroscience must address the challenge of studying subjective experiences.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
January 7, 2026
Andrew E Budson, Hinze Hogendoorn, Donna Rose Addis
Consciousness may be the explicit memory of past events or the cognitive capacity to simulate events, used to remember the past, experience the present, or imagine the future. Perceptual mechanisms represent an ongoing, editable best estimate of past, present, and future. At milliseconds to seconds timescales, there may be no hard boundary between perception and memory. Conscious perceptions, decisions, and actions are simulations of prior unconscious sensations, decisions, and actions. The neural correlates of consciousness may thus be those of simulation or explicit memory, involving the default mode, frontoparietal control, and salience networks. Each aspect of consciousness may have its own neural correlate.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
July 1, 2024
Marisa Carrasco, Miriam Spering
This Perspectives paper argues that experimental protocols examining qualitative differences between perception and action offer important insights into conscious and unconscious visual processing and their neural correlates. The authors present research using human eye movements as a sensitive measure of unconscious visual processing. They also caution that the growing use of oculomotor and pupillary responses in consciousness research should not lead researchers to infer conscious perception solely from no-report protocols, as these measures can reflect unconscious processing as well.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
October 1, 2020
Louis N Irwin, Brian A Irwin
Cognitive science is increasingly influenced by embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive perspectives alongside traditional computational assumptions. Neuroscience has advanced understanding of brain function within classical frameworks, but newer alternative perspectives can enrich interpretations of many findings. These frameworks highlight how an animal's cognitive requirements are shaped by its environment, how biology and ecology coevolve to shape cognition, and how cognition extends beyond the brain. The embodied cognition paradigm reveals the central role of 'place' in the cognitive landscape, offering insights for cognitive scientists and philosophers. The concept of place applies to cognitive function, species comparisons, ecologically relevant experimental designs, and approaches to the 'hard problem' of consciousness.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
September 1, 2017
Mika Koivisto, Simone Grassini, Niina Salminen-Vaparanta et al.
Conscious detection of an object and conscious identification of that object rely on different neural processes. In an experiment measuring event-related potentials (ERPs), participants performed tasks requiring either detection or identification of a visual stimulus. Behaviorally, a stimulus could be consciously detected without being identified. A posterior electrophysiological signature occurring 200-300 milliseconds after stimulus onset was sensitive to conscious detection but not to identification, which correlated with later widespread brain activity. These findings provide behavioral and neural evidence for elementary visual experiences that are not yet enriched with higher-level knowledge, suggesting that research on consciousness should focus on early phenomenal experiences to avoid confounding effects of higher-level processes.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
June 1, 2017
Brian A Metzger, Kyle E Mathewson, Evelina Tapia et al.
The P3b brain wave, previously linked to visual awareness, is associated with updates in conscious perception rather than with processing external stimuli themselves. In a binocular rivalry experiment, participants viewed competing images, one per eye, and brief probes were flashed over the dominant or suppressed image. The timing of the P3b wave corresponded to when participants reported a perceptual switch, not to when the probe occurred. This supports the idea that P3b signals a change in what is consciously perceived. The amplitude of an earlier wave, the P1, predicted how quickly a perceptual reversal happened, and the amplitude of the P3b predicted the duration of a mixed-percept stage.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience
December 1, 2012
Kyle E Mathewson, Christopher Prudhomme, Monica Fabiani et al.
Rhythmic visual stimuli can entrain ongoing neural oscillations in the human brain, locking the timing of excitability cycles and enhancing processing of predictable stimuli. The study shows that the phase of existing brain oscillations can be modified by rhythmic visual stimulation in the alpha frequency band, leading to phase-locked fluctuations in excitability that produce concomitant fluctuations in visual awareness. This entrainment effect depended on the amount of spontaneous alpha power before the experiment and the level of 12-Hz oscillation before each trial, and could not be explained by evoked activity. The findings support a role for alpha oscillations as pulsed inhibition of cortical activity and provide evidence for the quantized nature of conscious experience.