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Abstract
At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguish a variety of objects within it. This phenomenon instantiates two properties of conscious perception: integration and differentiation. Integration is the property of experiencing a collection of objects as a unitary percept and differentiation is the property of experiencing these objects as distinct from each other. Here, we evaluated the neural information dynamics underlying integration and differentiation of perceptual contents during bistable perception. Participants listened to a sequence of tones (auditory bistable stimuli) experienced either as a single stream (perceptual integration) or as two parallel streams (perceptual differentiation) of sounds. We computed neurophysiological indices of information integration and information differentiation with electroencephalographic and intracranial recordings. When perceptual alternations were endogenously driven, the integrated percept was associated with an increase in neural information integration and a decrease in neural differentiation across frontoparietal regions, whereas the opposite pattern was observed for the differentiated percept. However, when perception was exogenously driven by a change in the sound stream (no bistability), neural oscillatory power distinguished between percepts but information measures did not. We demonstrate that perceptual integration and differentiation can be mapped to theoretically motivated neural information signatures, suggesting a direct relationship between phenomenology and neurophysiology.
Highlights
Conscious experience does depend on the external information we receive from the environment and on internal information that is independent of sensory stimulation
Twenty-nine healthy participants and one patient implanted with intracranial electrodes listened to a repeating pattern of three tones followed by a temporal gap
By studying the neural dynamics (EEG and direct cortical recordings) of theoretically motivated information metrics, we show that empirically tractable measures of neural information integration (NII) and neural information differentiation (NID) map auditory percepts experienced either as perceptually integrated or differentiated, respectively
Summary
Conscious experience does depend on the external information we receive from the environment and on internal information that is independent of sensory stimulation. This dissociation between external stimulation and conscious experience is observed in several visual and auditory perceptual illusions in which two or more internally driven percepts alternate under unchanging external stimulation (Sterzer et al 2009). What are the neural markers of the integration and differentiation of internally driven perceptual contents? We propose that integration and differentiation of internally driven percepts can be neurophysiologically investigated during auditory bistability. During the particular form of auditory bistability employed here, an invariant sequence of tones is experienced as forming either an integrated percept (one stream) or a differentiated percept (two streams) (Snyder et al 2012; Fig. 1)
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