Causal manipulation of feed-forward and recurrent processing differentially affects measures of consciousness

Le résumé fourni par la source

It has been theorised that cortical feed-forward and recurrent neural activity support unconscious and conscious cognitive processes, respectively. Here we causally tested this by applying event-related transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) at early and late times relative to visual stimuli, within the context of TMS-induced blindsight where consciousness and unconscious perception dissociate. Consistent with pre-registered hypotheses, early TMS affected residual, reportedly “unseen” capacity. However, conscious perception also appeared critically dependent upon feed-forward processing to a greater extent than the later recurrent phase. Additional exploratory analyses suggested that these early effects dissociated from top-down criterion measures, which were most affected by later TMS. These findings are inconsistent with a simple dichotomy where feed-forward and recurrent processes correspond to unconscious and conscious mechanisms. Instead, different aspects of awareness may correspond to different phases of cortical dynamics in which initial processing is broadly perceptual whereas later recurrent processing might relate to decision to report.

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