title: Visual awareness of low-contrast stimuli is reflected in event-related brain potentials.
abstract: Visual awareness was studied in 11 subjects by using coherent and scrambled objects as stimuli. The stimuli were presented near the subjective perceptual threshold. Explicitly recognized stimuli elicited a specific negative ERP deflection peaking at 460 ms. Our reaction time experiment suggests that this visual awareness negativity (VAN) is similar to that found previously at a shorter latency. We propose that VAN might reflect the exact moment of becoming aware of the task-relevant stimulus properties and provide an online marker of the temporal dynamics of visual awareness.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Computational Engineering, Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki, HUT, Finland. viloja@lce.hut.fi
authors.forename: Ville
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Ojanen
authors.forename: Antti
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Revonsuo
authors.forename: Mikko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sams
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005074:Evoked Potentials, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*