Neural correlates of the contents of visual awareness in humans.
The immediacy and directness of our subjective visual experience belies the complexity of the neural mechanisms involved, which remain incompletely understood. This review focuses on how the subjective contents of human visual awareness are encoded in neural activity. Empirical evidence to date suggests that no single brain area is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Instead, necessary and sufficient conditions appear to involve both activation of a distributed representation of the visual scene in primary visual cortex and ventral visual areas, plus parietal and frontal activity. The key empirical focus is now on characterizing qualitative differences in the type of neural activity in these areas underlying conscious and unconscious processing. To this end, recent progress in developing novel approaches to accurately decoding the contents of consciousness from brief samples of neural activity show great promise.
Rees
Geraint
G
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK. g.rees@fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk
D001364:Awareness; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D003243:Consciousness; D006801:Humans; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D014795:Visual Pathways; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*