CONSCIOUSNESS Anoushiravan Zahedi

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS
The term ‘consciousness’ has multiple meanings,
1. one of them intransitive or state-of-vigilance (e.g. ‘the patient regained
conscious- ness’),
2. (Is it AROUSAL)
3. and the other transitive (e.g. ‘consciousness of color’).
4. (Is it ATTENTION?!)
ARE CONSCIOUSNESS AND SELECTIVE
ATTENTION THE SAME PHENOMENON?
A well- known definition of attention states ‘‘the taking possession by the mind, in
clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible
objects or trains of thought’’ is attention. But IS IT?!
1. Selection, also called selective attention, refers to the separation of relevant
versus irrelevant information,
2. Access refers to its conscious ‘‘taking possession of the mind’’.
3. So, closely related concepts but not the same.
LARGE-SCALE
THALAMOCORTICAL
NETWORK
Awakening into the vigilant state correlates
with a progressive increase in regional
cerebral blood flow,
1. first in the brainstem and thalamus,
2. then in the cortex with a particularly
important increase in prefrontal-
cingulate activation and functional
connectivity.
the neural workspace model:
ascending brain stem nuclei (e.g.
cholinergic among others) send
globally depolarizing
neuromodulatory signals to a thalamic
and cortical hierarchy. Simulations
show a progressive increase in
spontaneous firing as a function of
neuromodulator release, which
evolves into what is known in
dynamical systems theory as a Hopf
bifurcation.
By increasing spontaneous activity,
and thus bringing a broad
thalamocortical network closer to
firing threshold, vigilance lowers the
threshold for external sensory inputs.
WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER
CONSCIOUSNESS
o Lets’ go back to last session:
o Many neuroimaging experiments have demonstrated a tight correlation between the
conscious visual perception and the activation of striate and extrastriate visual areas.
o It has been proposed that the conscious perception of a given visual attribute
resides in the extrastriate area specialized for that attribute (e.g. area MT/V5 for
motion, or area V4 for color). A ‘micro- consciousness’ would be involved whenever
that area receives a sufficient amount of activation.
o But is it that really happening?
SO WHAT IS THE UNDERPINNING
CHARACTERISTIC OF THE ACCESS TO
CONSCIOUS REPORT
o In addition to vigilance and bottom-up activation, a third factor underlying
conscious access is the extension of brain activation to higher association cortices
interconnected by long-distance connections and forming a reverberating neuronal
assembly with distant perceptual areas.
o Sudden parieto-frontal activation and top-down amplification are two frequent
signatures of conscious perception.
o Empirically, access of sensory stimuli to conscious report correlates with the
activation of higher associative cortices, particularly parietal, prefrontal and anterior
cingulate areas.
MENTAL CHRONOMETRY
o According to some authors, the difference between conscious and non-conscious
processing primarily resides in different levels of activation in early stimulus-
specific areas
o Others, however, emphasize that these early events can also be observed under non-
conscious conditions, and therefore suggest that the critical correlate of conscious
access is a late, optional triggering of a ‘second stage’ of processing involving a
distributed frontoparietal network
o Which of those observed effects corresponds to the primary correlates of conscious
access?
 TIME-COURSE
FROM
ATTENTIONAL
BLINK
• What is Attentional blink task?

• How does it help to understand the

debate on sensory-activation or late
fronto parietal network activation?
• The intensity of the N2 wave decreased linearly
with reduced T2 visibility. By contrast, the N3,
P3a and late P3b waves showed a nonlinear
relation to visibility. They were present only
when T2 visibility was above 50%, whereas
below 50% visibility, T2 did not evoke any
significant activity in comparison to ‘T2 absent’
trials
 WHY ATTENTIONAL BLINK
OCCURRED?
The presence of the T1
task, which causes the
blink, seemed to affect
principally the same
processing stages
(indexed by the N2, P3a
and P3b waves) that were
also found to be involved
in conscious access to T2.
WHAT IF ATTENTION AND DEPTH OF
PROCESSING WERE IMPORTANT FACTORS IN
PREVIOUSLY DESCRIBED STUDIES?
o Some have argued that many of previously presented neuroimaging paradigms are
inappropriately controlled because conscious perception is confounded with
increased attention and more extended stimulus processing.
o Such confounds would suffice to explain the greater parieto-prefrontal activity to
unmasked words.
o For this reason, Tse et al. have argued that one should prefer experimental designs
in which attention is drawn away from the stimulus. They show that, in such a
situation, correlates of stimulus visibility are found solely in occipital areas, not in
higher associative regions, and therefore argue that the mechanisms of conscious
visual perception lie in extrastriate cortex.
WHAT ABOUT ACTIVATION IN
PRIMARY PERCEPTIONAL CORTEX
What is binocular Rivalry?

How does it help to have

another perspective to
activation in primary
cortices?
DOES THE BRAIN ACTIVATION IN
PRIMARY CORTICES CORRELATE
WITH CONSCIOUSNESS?
UPPER AND LOWER BOUNDARY
OF VISUAL AWARENESS
TWO POSSIBLE
EXPLANATIONS
o Confiding search to area responding to target (target - mask)
o Care should be taken not to generalize these results to claims about the neural
correlates of awareness of objects more complex than the simple targets used here.
For instance, circuits that maintain the awareness of other types of visual processes,
such as motion perception, may lie outside the occipital cortex.
o Even an unmasked stimulus is not guaranteed to be consciously perceived. On the
contrary, considerable evidence indicates that without attention, conscious
perception cannot occur.
oBack to our stand: Both bottom-up stimulus strength and top-down attentional
amplification (whether triggered voluntarily or by automatic attraction) are jointly
needed for conscious perception, but they might not always be sufficient for a
stimulus to cross the threshold for conscious perception.
IS THERE ANY
CONTRADICTORY STUDY?
 INTRACRANIAL RECORDING CAN
EVEN GIVE US MORE PRECISE
VANTAGE
1. late (>300 ms) and distributed event-related
potentials contacting sites in prefrontal cortex;
2. large and late (>300 ms) increases in induced
power (indexing local synchrony) in high-
gamma frequencies (50–100 Hz), accompanied
by a decrease in lower- frequency power
(centered around 10 Hz);
3. increases in long-distance cortico-cortical
synchrony in the beta frequency band 13–30
Hz;
4. increases in causal relations among distant
cortical areas, bidirectionally but more strongly
in the bottom- up direction
VIDEO OF ABSOLUTE
POWER (iERP)
 CAN A TAXONOMY HELP TO RECONCILE
CONTRADICTORY RESULTS?
The proposal a formal definition of two types
of non-conscious processes:
1. Subliminal processing. We define
subliminal processing as a condition of
information inaccessibility where bottom-
up activation is insufficient to trigger a
large-scale reverberating state in a global
network of neurons with long range axons.
2. Preconscious processing. A neural process
that potentially carries enough activation
for conscious access, but is temporarily
buffered in a non-conscious store because
of a lack of top-down attentional
amplification
1. Masking when stimuli are attended: subliminal
versus conscious stimuli- both early extrastriate
and late parietal and prefrontal
2. Stimuli presented at threshold: subliminal versus
conscious stimuli- both early (e.g. P100) and late
(e.g. P300) correlates of conscious perception
3. Masking when stimuli are not attended:
subliminal and preconscious processing-only the
early components of occipitotemporal
4. Stimuli made invisible by inattention:
preconscious and conscious processing-late (200–
300 ms after the stimulus) and involves parieto-
prefrontal
LET’S JUST REVIEW: TASKS
Subliminal presentation is often
achieved by masking, a method whereby
the subjective visibility of a stimulus is
reduced or eliminated by the
presentation, in close spatial and
temporal contiguity, of other stimuli
acting as ‘‘masks’’
What if preconscious processing is our
goal? In inattentional blindness, a
potentially visible but unexpected
stimulus remains unreported when the
participants’ attention is focused on
another task
The attentional blink (AB) is a short-
term variant of this effect where a brief
distraction by a first stimulus T1
prevents the conscious perception of a
second stimulus T2 briefly presented
within a few hundreds of milliseconds
of T1.
 LET’S JUST REVIEW: MEASUREMENT
OF CONSCIOUSNESS
According to a long psychophysical tradition, grounded What about subjective rating of
in signal-detection theory, a stimulus should be conscious perception?
accepted as nonconscious only if subjects are unable to
perform above chance on some direct task of stimulus 1. Recent alternative approaches
detection or classification. emphasize either pure subjective
reports, such as ratings of
Problems: stimulus visibility
1. overestimate conscious perception 2. Second-order commentaries such
as post-decision wagering
2. performance can be at chance level for some tasks,
but not others
3. the approach requires accepting the null hypoth- esis
of chance-level performance
CRITICAL THINKING
o First, differences in neural activity may stem from physical differences in the stimuli. To
control this, many experiments now employ identical stimuli and rely on participants’
subjective reports to differentiate seen and unseen conditions. Even then, stimuli also
differ in their depth of processing: performance is typically much higher for conscious
trials
o and several operations may only be feasible in the conscious state,
o The main effect of seen vs unseen trials may, therefore, reveal processing differences
unrelated to the actual cerebral encoding of a conscious or unconscious stimulus, and
reflecting solely, the operations that precede follow or even coincide with conscious access
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