The SSVEP tracks attention, not consciousness, during perceptual filling-in

Abstract

Research on the neural basis of conscious perception has almost exclusively shown that becoming aware of a stimulus leads to increased neural responses. By designing a novel form of perceptual filling-in (PFI) overlaid with a dynamic texture display, we frequency-tagged multiple disappearing targets as well as their surroundings. We show that in a PFI paradigm, the disappearance of a stimulus and subjective invisibility is associated with increases in neural activity, as measured with steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs), in electroencephalography (EEG). We also find that this increase correlates with alpha-band activity, a well-established neural measure of attention. These findings cast doubt on the direct relationship previously reported between the strength of neural activity and conscious perception, at least when measured with current tools, such as the SSVEP. Instead, we conclude that SSVEP strength more closely measures changes in attention.

The Neural Correlates of Access Consciousness and Phenomenal Consciousness Seem to Coincide and Would Correspond to a Memory Center, an Activation Center and Eight Parallel Convergence Centers

“…A careful examination of these two theories leads to the conclusion that the NC of AC and PC coincide and in fact, the two consciences are mirror images of each other; they are two faces of the same coin, that is, of the only consciousness, in which cognitive and subjective contents are simultaneously Frontiers in Psychology | www.frontiersin.org present. New findings from recent studies on attention (Davidson et al, 2020) and consciousness (Mashour et al, 2020) are converging to validate the hypotheses set out in this article. We hope this trend continues.…”

“…In the current state of the field, the consensus is increasing in favor of the hypothesis that there is a clear separation between attention and consciousness ( van Boxtel et al, 2010 ; Cohen et al, 2012 ; Koch and Tsuchiya, 2015 ; Baier et al, 2020 ; Davidson et al, 2020 ). In this context, attention is believed to select from among the unconscious perceptual images coming from either the environment or memory, those that are then made conscious by the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC; Mashour et al, 2020 ).…”

Harmonic Amplitude Summation for Frequency-tagging Analysis

“…In many studies, higher harmonic responses are not even reported (e.g., Bekhtereva, Pritschmann, Keil, & Müller, 2018;Min, Dähne, Ahn, Noh, & Müller, 2016;Paulk, Kirszenblat, Zhou, & van Swinderen, 2015;Coia, Jones, Duncan, & Crognale, 2014;Kuś et al, 2013;Cottereau et al, 2011;Wattam-Bell et al, 2010;Di Russo et al, 2007;Müller et al, 2006;Braddick, Birtles, Wattam-Bell, & Atkinson, 2005;Chen, Seth, Gally, & Edelman, 2003;Heinrich & Bach, 2001;Regan & Regan, 1988a;Tononi et al, 1998;Peterzell & Norcia, 1997;Müller, Teder, & Hillyard, 1997;Morgan, Hansen, & Hillyard, 1996, or are extirpated by narrow [band-pass, Gabor, etc. ] filtering, e.g., Davidson, Mithen, Hogendoorn, van Boxtel, & Tsuchiya, 2020;Miskociv & Keil, 2013;Anderson & Müller, 2010;Regan, 1975). Does it matter?…”

Alpha oscillations and stimulus-evoked activity dissociate metacognitive reports of attention, visibility and confidence in a rapid visual detection task

“…the RSVP response) contaminating our measure of alpha band activity within the preparatory window, we avoided the use of a sliding window spectrogram (e.g. (Davidson et al, 2020)), or time-frequency decomposition via wavelet transform (e.g. (Benwell et al, 2017; Iemi et al, 2017)).…”