The relationship between perception (the formation of a neural representation of an object or event) and awareness (the formation of a neural representation that is accessible to introspection and explicit report) remains a significant open question in cognitive neuroscience. It is fundamental to our understanding of many cognitive disorders including schizophrenia and other disorders involving unwanted endogenously-generated experiences. It is also a central question in cognitive and social psychology: what underlies so-called """"""""automatic"""""""" processing, and how is it different from the """"""""non-automatic"""""""" processing associated with cognitive control? The direction that I intend to pursue in my research is to compare the neural dynamics underlying perception with and without awareness. Given that a perceptual object (a face, for example) is represented in the brain, what determines whether or not this representation is accompanied by awareness of its content? Recent studies of neglect patients and normal subjects demonstrate that category-specific neural responses are possible without awareness of the stimulus. It has been argued that the level of activation in these areas is the determining factor. I will argue, based on the theory of Marcel Kinsbourne, that level of activation alone is not sufficient to account for awareness, but that, in addition, the stability and/or coherence of the distributed pattern of activation is a factor in determining whether or not information reaches awareness. I have designed and begun to carry out a set of behavioral and fMRI experiments designed to test this hypothesis. ? ? ?
| Schurger, Aaron; Kim, Min-Soo; Cohen, Jonathan D (2015) Paradoxical Interaction between Ocular Activity, Perception, and Decision Confidence at the Threshold of Vision. PLoS One 10:e0125278 |
| Schurger, Aaron; Pereira, Francisco; Treisman, Anne et al. (2010) Reproducibility distinguishes conscious from nonconscious neural representations. Science 327:97-9 |
| Stoolmiller, M (2001) Synergistic interaction of child manageability problems and parent-discipline tactics in predicting future growth in externalizing behavior for boys. Dev Psychol 37:814-25 |
