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Consciousness and Cognition Dec 2015Lin and Murray published in the 2015 January Issue of Psychological Science a study that claims to have made the surprising discovery of unconscious effects that are... (Review)
Review
Lin and Murray published in the 2015 January Issue of Psychological Science a study that claims to have made the surprising discovery of unconscious effects that are stronger than equivalent conscious effects. Specifically, the authors claim to have uncovered dissociable components of aware and unaware orienting and inhibition in exogenous cueing. They suggest an awareness-dependent location-based inhibition mechanism referred to as a negative attentional aftereffect. Here we argue for a simpler explanation, based on established literature, that all they have shown is response inhibition to a consciously perceived cue presented at a fixed location.
Topics: Attention; Awareness; Humans; Inhibition, Psychological; Psychomotor Performance; Visual Perception
PubMed: 26414623
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.09.006 -
Attention, Perception & Psychophysics May 2020Visual attention can sometimes be involuntarily captured by salient stimuli, and this may lead to impaired performance in a variety of real-world tasks. If observers...
Visual attention can sometimes be involuntarily captured by salient stimuli, and this may lead to impaired performance in a variety of real-world tasks. If observers were aware that their attention was being captured, they might be able to exert control and avoid subsequent distraction. However, it is unknown whether observers can detect attention capture when it occurs. In the current study, participants searched for a target shape and attempted to ignore a salient color distractor. On a subset of trials, participants then immediately classified whether the salient distractor captured their attention ("capture" vs. "no capture"). Participants were slower and less accurate at detecting the target on trials on which they reported "capture" than "no capture." Follow-up experiments revealed that participants specifically detected covert shifts of attention to the salient item. Altogether, these results indicate that observers can have immediate awareness of visual distraction, at least under certain circumstances.
Topics: Adolescent; Attention; Awareness; Color Perception; Female; Humans; Male; Photic Stimulation; Reaction Time; Thinking; Young Adult
PubMed: 31970711
DOI: 10.3758/s13414-019-01936-9 -
Consciousness and Cognition Aug 2020Research suggests that the electrophysiological correlates of consciousness are similar in hearing as in vision: the auditory awareness negativity (AAN) and the late...
Research suggests that the electrophysiological correlates of consciousness are similar in hearing as in vision: the auditory awareness negativity (AAN) and the late positivity (LP). However, from a recently proposed signal-detection perspective, these correlates may be confounded by performance, as the strength of the internal responses differs between aware and unaware trials. Here, we tried to apply this signal-detection approach to correct for performance in an auditory discrimination and detection task (N = 28). A large proportion of subjects had to be excluded because even a small response bias distorted the correction. For the remaining subjects, the correction mainly increased noise in the measurement. Furthermore, the signal-detection approach is theoretically problematic because it may isolate post-perceptual processes and eliminate awareness-related activity. Therefore, we conclude that AAN and LP are not confounded by performance and that the contrastive analysis identifies both as correlates of awareness.
Topics: Adolescent; Adult; Awareness; Consciousness; Electroencephalography; Evoked Potentials; Female; Humans; Male; Pitch Discrimination; Signal Detection, Psychological; Young Adult
PubMed: 32485343
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2020.102954 -
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews May 2010Electrophysiological recordings during visual tasks can shed light on the temporal dynamics of the subjective experience of seeing, visual awareness. This paper reviews... (Review)
Review
Electrophysiological recordings during visual tasks can shed light on the temporal dynamics of the subjective experience of seeing, visual awareness. This paper reviews studies on electrophysiological correlates of visual awareness operationalized as the difference between event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to stimuli that enter awareness and stimuli that do not. There are three candidates for such a correlate: enhancement of P1 around 100 ms, enhancement of early posterior negativity around 200 ms (visual awareness negativity, VAN), and enhancement of late positivity (LP) in the P3 time window around 400 ms. Review of studies using different manipulations of awareness suggests that VAN is the correlate of visual awareness that most consistently emerges across different manipulations of visual awareness. VAN emerges also relatively independent of manipulations of nonspatial attention, but seems to be dependent on spatial attention. The results suggest that visual awareness emerges about 200 ms after the onset of visual stimulation as a consequence of the activation of posterior occipito-temporal and parietal networks.
Topics: Attention; Awareness; Brain; Evoked Potentials; Humans; Visual Perception
PubMed: 20005249
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.12.002 -
Handbook of Clinical Neurology 2011
Topics: Animals; Awareness; Humans; Sleep; Sleep Wake Disorders; Wakefulness
PubMed: 21056174
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-444-52006-7.00047-2 -
Neuropsychological Rehabilitation Aug 2006It has been known for well over a century that brain-damaged patients are often unaware of the very deficits that impair performance in everyday life. Pathologies of... (Review)
Review
It has been known for well over a century that brain-damaged patients are often unaware of the very deficits that impair performance in everyday life. Pathologies of awareness have been described for many neurological, psychiatric and neuropsychological deficits and the construct of "awareness" or "insight" understandably now receives attention from many researchers within the clinical and cognitive neurosciences. This paper does not attempt to explain the nature of consciousness or its impairment but rather considers four aspects of consciousness/awareness that health care professionals interested in understanding, measuring and improving deficits of awareness should consider.
Topics: Awareness; Cognition Disorders; Consciousness; Neuropsychological Tests; Psychiatric Status Rating Scales
PubMed: 16864482
DOI: 10.1080/09602010500309762 -
Handbook of Clinical Neurology 2015Questionnaire-based demonstrations of impaired self-awareness (SA) after traumatic brain injury (TBI) are not always supported by experimental studies of in-the-moment... (Review)
Review
Questionnaire-based demonstrations of impaired self-awareness (SA) after traumatic brain injury (TBI) are not always supported by experimental studies of in-the-moment or online awareness. This chapter begins by describing the clinical phenomenon of impaired SA, how it is measured, and why its interdependency with mechanisms of online awareness may provide the scaffolding from which appraisals of cognitive functioning can be accurately revised following a brain injury. We review research that has measured unawareness of errors in routine action in TBI patients and propose more rigorous methodological approaches to studying the emergent properties of awareness with greater clarity in the laboratory. We discuss how neuropsychological and electrophysiologic studies are beginning to inform our understanding of impaired error processing in TBI patients and we highlight recent theory proposing that online metacognitive processes accumulate evidence of erroneous responses in a graded fashion. Neural signals with amplitudes that scale with the strength of accruing evidence and peak latencies that mark the threshold at which awareness emerges represent important neural mechanisms to examine the breakdown of error awareness after brain injury. We also discuss how errors can be investigated in relation to different sources of evidence that contribute to aware experiences after brain injury. Finally, we explore conditions beyond error signaling, and how different "objects of insight" that require retrospective and prospective judgments of confidence need to be examined in relation to the clinical phenomenon of impaired SA.
Topics: Awareness; Brain Injuries; Cognition Disorders; Humans; Neuropsychological Tests; Online Systems; Self Concept
PubMed: 25701904
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-444-63521-1.00032-7 -
Emotion (Washington, D.C.) Feb 2019Recent work has challenged the previously widely accepted belief that affective processing does not require awareness and can be carried out with more limited resources...
Recent work has challenged the previously widely accepted belief that affective processing does not require awareness and can be carried out with more limited resources than semantic processing. This debate has focused exclusively on visual perception, even though evidence from both human and animal studies suggests that existence for nonconscious affective processing would be physiologically more feasible in the auditory system. Here we contrast affective and semantic processing of nonverbal emotional vocalizations under different levels of awareness in three experiments, using explicit (two-alternative forced choice masked affective and semantic categorization tasks, Experiments 1 and 2) and implicit (masked affective and semantic priming, Experiment 3) measures. Identical stimuli and design were used in the semantic and affective tasks. Awareness was manipulated by altering stimulus-mask signal-to-noise ratio during continuous auditory masking. Stimulus awareness was measured on each trial using a four-point perceptual awareness scale. In explicit tasks, neither affective nor semantic categorization could be performed in the complete absence of awareness, while both tasks could be performed above chance level when stimuli were consciously perceived. Semantic categorization was faster than affective evaluation. When the stimuli were partially perceived, semantic categorization accuracy exceeded affective evaluation accuracy. In implicit tasks neither affective nor semantic priming occurred in the complete absence of awareness, whereas both affective and semantic priming emerged when participants were aware of the primes. We conclude that auditory semantic processing is faster than affective processing, and that both affective and semantic auditory processing are dependent on awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Adult; Awareness; Emotions; Female; Humans; Male; Reaction Time; Young Adult
PubMed: 29504800
DOI: 10.1037/emo0000388 -
Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral... Oct 2021In Pavlovian fear conditioning, contingency awareness provides an indicator of explicit fear learning. A less studied aspect of fear-based psychopathologies and their...
In Pavlovian fear conditioning, contingency awareness provides an indicator of explicit fear learning. A less studied aspect of fear-based psychopathologies and their treatment, awareness of learned fear is a common cause of distress in persons with such conditions and is a focus of their treatment. The present work is a substudy of a broader fear-conditioning fMRI study. Following fear conditioning, we identified a subset of individuals who did not exhibit explicit awareness of the CS-US contingency. This prompted an exploratory analysis of differences in "aware" versus "unaware" individuals after fear conditioning. Self-reported expectancies of the CS-US contingency obtained immediately following fear conditioning were used to differentiate the two groups. Results corrected for multiple comparisons indicated significantly greater BOLD signal in the bilateral dlPFC, right vmPFC, bilateral vlPFC, left insula, left hippocampus, and bilateral amygdala for the CS+>CS- contrast in the aware group compared with the unaware group (all p values ≤ 0.004). PPI analysis with a left hippocampal seed indicated stronger coupling with the dlPFC and vmPFC in the aware group compared with the unaware group (all p values ≤ 0.002). Our findings add to our current knowledge of the networks involved in explicit learning and awareness of conditioned fear, with important clinical implications.
Topics: Amygdala; Awareness; Conditioning, Classical; Fear; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging
PubMed: 33990933
DOI: 10.3758/s13415-021-00909-6 -
Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology Jun 2006This review will outline old and recent data about the prevalence, causes and potential consequences of intraoperative awareness in children and give details on its... (Review)
Review
PURPOSE OF REVIEW
This review will outline old and recent data about the prevalence, causes and potential consequences of intraoperative awareness in children and give details on its detection.
RECENT FINDINGS
Recent studies have confirmed the higher incidence of intraoperative awareness in children than in adults while using modern anaesthetic techniques. To detect this complication in children, the Brice interview, commonly used in adults, has to be adapted to children's cognitive capacities, with an extended follow-up. Neither the old nor the recent studies clearly identify predictive risk factors. Children describe the same perceptions as adults during their awareness period (mainly auditory and tactile sensations), but with fewer negative thoughts. Moreover, they do not seem to be affected by this experience, as they do not have long-term psychological sequelae. The prevention of intraoperative awareness in children is the same as in adults, the major factor being awareness of this complication.
SUMMARY
Intraoperative awareness is a reality in school-aged children. A larger multicentre study and large-scale follow-up is required in order to confirm the higher incidence of awareness and identify the risk factors and long-term psychological sequelae of this complication in the paediatric population.
Topics: Adolescent; Awareness; Child; Child, Preschool; Humans; Intraoperative Complications; Mythology; Risk Factors
PubMed: 16735815
DOI: 10.1097/01.aco.0000192808.63785.bd