Abstract
A powerful paradigm to identify neural correlates of consciousness is binocular rivalry, wherein a constant visual stimulus evokes a varying conscious percept. It has recently been suggested that activity modulations observed during rivalry may represent the act of report rather than the conscious percept itself. Here, we performed single-unit recordings from face patches in macaque inferotemporal (IT) cortex using a no-report paradigm in which the animal's conscious percept was inferred from eye movements. We found that large proportions of IT neurons represented the conscious percept even without active report. Furthermore, on single trials we could decode both the conscious percept and the suppressed stimulus. Together, these findings indicate that (1) IT cortex possesses a true neural correlate of consciousness and (2) this correlate consists of a population code wherein single cells multiplex representation of the conscious percept and veridical physical stimulus, rather than a subset of cells perfectly reflecting consciousness.
Highlights
Having conscious experience is arguably the most important reason why it matters to us whether we are alive or dead
A paradigm known as binocular rivalry is useful for distinguishing responses related to conscious perception from those driven by obligatory processing of physical input (Blake et al, 2014; Tong et al, 2006): when two incompatible stimuli such as a face and an object are shown to the left and right eyes, respectively, one does not perceive a constant superimposition of the two but rather an alternation between face and object, even though the physical input is fixed (Figure 1a)
We developed a new no-report paradigm for tracking conscious state and used it to investigate the neural correlate of consciousness in face patches within macaque IT cortex
Summary
Having conscious experience is arguably the most important reason why it matters to us whether we are alive or dead. A paradigm known as binocular rivalry is useful for distinguishing responses related to conscious perception from those driven by obligatory processing of physical input (Blake et al, 2014; Tong et al, 2006): when two incompatible stimuli such as a face and an object are shown to the left and right eyes, respectively, one does not perceive a constant superimposition of the two but rather an alternation between face and object, even though the physical input is fixed (Figure 1a). Since these alternations are internally generated, they cannot be attributed to pure feedforward processing of external input
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