Shelled shut-ins: a conditional escape task showing perceptual awareness in hermit crabs

Perceptual awareness and decision formation unfold gradually as sensory evidence increases. Near the threshold of awareness, small differences in neural processing efficiency can be amplified into marked behavioral variability. Open-skill athletes are trained to make rapid decisions under dynamic and uncertain conditions, yet it remains unclear whether their perceptual advantage reflects enhanced early sensory sensitivity or more efficient late-stage evidence accumulation. This study aimed to identify the processing stage at which open-skill sports expertise exerts its influence. Twenty-five open-skill athletes and twenty-three non-athlete controls completed a visual orientation discrimination task with eight graded levels of stimulus visibility, ranging from subliminal to clearly visible. Behavioral performance was analyzed together with hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling to estimate latent decision parameters. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded using a 64-channel EEG system during an active decision task and a passive viewing task, focusing on early (N2, P2) and late (P3) components. ERP-behavior correlations were examined across visibility levels. No group differences were observed at the lowest visibility levels. Group differences emerged selectively at intermediate to high visibility levels, where athletes showed higher accuracy and a tendency toward faster responses. Drift-diffusion modeling revealed that this advantage was driven by higher drift rates in athletes, with no group differences in non-decision time, boundary separation, or starting point. Early ERP components (N2, P2) were strongly modulated by stimulus visibility but showed no consistent group differences. In contrast, the P3 component exhibited earlier and more pronounced differentiation across visibility levels in athletes. In the passive viewing task, group differences were substantially reduced. ERP-behavior analyses showed stronger and earlier P3-behavior coupling in athletes. Open-skill sports expertise selectively optimizes late-stage evidence accumulation and its translation into behavior, rather than enhancing unconscious or early sensory processing.

ABSTRACT As a racialized group that is subject to discrimination, US Latinxs are often considered “natural” coalitional partners for Black-led civil rights struggles. Although the BLM movement may serve as a potential site for cross-racial coalition building because both Latinxs and Blacks suffer from racial profiling by law enforcement, the development of a shared status across group boundaries hinges on the interpretation by Latinxs of both their personal- and group-level discrimination experiences. Using the 2020 CMPS, I explore how multiple dimensions of Latinx racial group consciousness (perceptions of discrimination, intra- and intergroup commonality, and racial identity) shape their cross-racial alliances with Black social movements. Results from multivariate analysis show that Latinxs who acknowledge Black Americans’ continued struggle against racial discrimination in both American society and the Latinx community are positively oriented toward the BLM movement. Findings also reveal contrasting effects for inter- and intragroup commonality: the former is strongly and consistently predictive of increased support for the BLM Movement, whereas the latter is associated with decreased support. These findings underscore both the opportunities and challenges for Latinx–Black political coalition building.

Aging is associated with widespread structural and functional changes in the brain including reduced neural plasticity, slower information processing, and impaired network integration. These age-related alterations influence the brain's response to anesthetic agents, particularly electroencephalography (EEG) activity. This narrative review summarizes the characteristic EEG features induced by commonly used hypnotic agents such as propofol, inhaled anesthetics, dexmedetomidine, ketamine, and remimazolam in elderly patients and examines how aging modulates these responses. With increasing age, EEG power shows a global decline, most prominently in the alpha frequency band (8-13 Hz), reflecting reduced thalamocortical and cortical activity. Peak alpha frequency slows progressively with age, and background EEG also often exhibits characteristic slowing, both of which are associated with cognitive decline. In addition, EEG reactivity to external stimuli diminishes, and integrative brain activity, representing coordinated processing across cortical regions, is reduced in older adults. Frontoparietal feedback connectivity, essential for conscious perception and information integration, is particularly weak in the elderly. These changes are further exacerbated under anesthesia, as general anesthetics disrupt top-down connectivity and reduce network integration. Graph-theoretical EEG analyses reveal age-related reductions in global efficiency, modularity, and small-world properties, which are signatures of a less efficient, more random, and fragmented brain network. Understanding these age-specific EEG alterations can improve intraoperative monitoring, anesthetic titration, and development of age-tailored EEG-guided strategies. Future research should aim to validate EEG biomarkers that reliably reflect anesthetic depth and brain health in elderly populations, thereby fostering safer anesthesia care in the aging population.

Fundamentals of Neurogastroenterology: Physiological Aspects and Clinical Implications.

As individuals age, the ability to perceive and interpret tactile stimuli declines, impacting daily function and quality of life. One factor contributing to this decline is cognitive-perceptual load, which refers to the demand placed on limited cognitive resources allocated for processing and attending to sensory stimuli. This study investigates the modulation of cognitive-perceptual load on tactile detection and gap detection in older adults, incorporating concurrent auditory stimuli to replicate real-world multi-sensory environments. Detection and gap detection of electrotactile stimuli applied to the skin were assessed in two studies, examining a total of 26 right arm dominant older adults. Participants completed tactile detection and gap detection tasks under two conditions, with and without concurrent auditory stimuli. Detecting auditory stimuli significantly impacted the variance of electrotactile stimuli detection (P < 0.001), but not mean (P = 0.145). In contrast, discriminating auditory stimuli significantly impacted the mean of electrotactile stimuli gap detection (P < 0.001), but not variance (P = 0.698). Arm dominance significantly impacted the mean of electrotactile stimuli gap detection (P = 0.011), but not detection (P = 0.936). Participant age significantly impacted the mean of electrotactile stimuli detection (p = 0.018), but not gap detection (P = 0.558). This work highlights the importance of accounting for cognitive-perceptual load when assessing tactile perception in older adults. Future work can further explore the influence of cognitive-perceptual load in clinical populations (e.g., following a brain injury) and examine additional factors that influence conscious tactile perception.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This study examined how older adults detect and discriminate electrotactile stimuli in the presence and absence of auditory stimuli. The findings highlight that increased cognitive demands can impair accurate perception of tactile stimuli. By further understanding how cognitive-perceptual load influences tactile perception, we can better understand the different factors that influence intact tactile perception, and in turn, explore when and why tactile impairments arise in patient populations.

This research aims to assess the level of legal consciousness of Jordanian professional football players who have played in their official football leagues about their rights and liabilities linked with a professional contract. This research is driven by major categories such as knowledge on rights from the contract, knowledge on contract termination and dispute resolution, awareness of legal counsel and contractual fairness perception. A special c questionnaire with four domains and fifteen items was formulated using the related literature and validated by experts. In total, 120 players were surveyed and statistical analyses such as descriptive statistics, One-Way ANOVA and independent samples t-tests were employed to determine the differences in legal awareness according to years of professional experience and previous professional experience abroad. Results show that there is a low level of awareness of the law in general terms, although more experienced players and those who have competed professionally outside Jordan are significantly higher. These findings emphasize the importance of legal education and institutional support for improving players’ knowledge about contractual rights and protective mechanisms. The paper suggests some practical strategies for players, clubs and governing bodies to increase legal literacy and protect the interests of the players.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which reflect the rapid advancements in technology, has led to their widespread use in various fields, including health, finance and education. The effective and efficient use of AI tools in education is closely related to teachers’ awareness in this regard. The objective of this study is to comprehensively ex-amine the AI awareness status of teachers by employing a mixed-method approach. The present study is designed based on a triangulation design and is conducted with a sample of 260 teachers. The findings of the study demonstrate that teachers have a moderate level of AI awareness, and that this awareness improves through AI tool use, receiving training, following publications, and daily internet use. The qualitative findings of the study corroborate the quantitative findings in that they also demonstrate that teachers have limited awareness of conceptual perception, educational use, and positive–negative effects concerning AI tools. The findings further indicate that the majority of educators acknowledge the benefits of AI while also expressing concerns about its limitations, resulting in an ambivalent perception. The prevailing opinion among educators is that AI is not yet capable of replacing teachers due to its inability to replicate affective skills such as empathy and building rapport. However, it is also reported that the effectiveness of this phenomenon is contingent upon conscious utilization.

Reflection, as a key component of the educational process, strengthens the child’s sense of identity, self-awareness, and ability to learn consciously. Although the theoretical foundations of reflection are widely studied in educational science, its practical application in the context of preschool education remains fragmented and under-researched. The aim of this study is to reveal how preschool teachers understand, apply, and model the reflection process in educating 4–5-year-old children, to reveal the role of reflection between pedagogical action and conscious perception of education. The study is based on a qualitative methodology, applying the semi-structured interview method and the principles of qualitative content analysis. The study involved preschool teachers and educational support specialists working with 4–5-year-old children. Data analysis made it possible to identify the fundamental directions of the concept and application of reflection in pedagogical practice. The results of the study showed that reflection in preschool education acts as a link between action and awareness, that is, a process that allows both the teacher and the child to reflect on and transform the educational experience. It manifests itself through emotional awareness, self-assessment, professional growth, and adaptation of activities to the needs of children. Reflective practices integrated into daily education promote children’s metacognitive and emotional abilities, strengthen their self-awareness and motivation for learning, and provide teachers with the opportunity to purposefully improve their professional practice and improve the quality of education.

Binocular rivalry occurs when two eyes are presented with two conflicting stimuli. Although the physical stimulation stays the same, the conscious percept changes over time. This property makes it a unique paradigm in both vision science and consciousness research. Two key parameters, contrast and attention, were repeatedly shown to affect binocular rivalry dynamics in a similar manner. This was taken as evidence that attention acts by enhancing effective stimulus contrast. Brief transition periods between the two clear percepts have so far been much less investigated. In a previous study we demonstrated that transition periods can appear in different forms depending on the stimulus type and the observer. In the current study, we investigated how attention and contrast affect transition appearance. Observers viewed binocular rivalry and reported their perception of the four most common transition types by a button press while either the stimulus contrast or the locus of exogenous attention was manipulated. We show that contrast and attention similarly affect the overall binocular rivalry dynamics, but their effects on the appearance of transitions differ. These results suggest that the effect of attention is different from a simple enhancement of stimulus strength, which becomes evident only when different transition types are considered.

Purpose This study reports library assessment practitioner awareness of ACRL’s proficiencies for assessment in academic libraries, ranks each proficiency according to perceived importance and elicits opinions about expected venues for acquiring learning related to key proficiencies. Design/methodology/approach An online survey was used to elicit library practitioners’ awareness of perceptions of the importance of individual assessment proficiencies and expected venues for learning or skill acquisition. Findings The majority of participants had limited to no awareness of the proficiencies. Respondents prioritized two main foci of the assessment proficiencies: (1) data safety and (2) connection of assessment design, analysis and action-taking to user needs and community contexts. Respondents shared expectations that many important assessment proficiencies would be learned primarily in library school or through independent learning; other key learning venues included conferences, lectures, panels or webinars; hands-on workshops or on-the-job training venues. Practical implications Study results – including proficiencies that respondents prioritized for learning and preferred venues for learning – can help practitioners, library leaders and educators focus on professional development offerings, professional education and assessment-related individual learning plans. Originality/value Little research has examined librarian perceptions of the ACRL assessment proficiencies.

Effective treatments are available for major depressive disorder; however, treatment efficacy is less pronounced in real-life settings compared to research. One reason for this discrepancy may be that treatment outcomes assessed in research do not fully reflect domains important to treatment recipients: clients and their informal caregivers. Moreover, studies often struggle to assess the impact of process-related factors on treatment success. More research incorporating client and informal caregiver perspectives is therefore needed to identify what they consider essential for a successful treatment. Group Concept Mapping was employed to elicit insights from clients and informal caregivers regarding their experiences with depression treatment. Twenty-one participants brainstormed in response to the statement: "Successful depression treatment requires…". Subsequently, 32 participants sorted the identified factors into meaningful groups and rated their importance to treatment success. Participants generated 79 unique responses in the brainstorm. They sorted these responses into 10 clusters: "The client", "Treatment process", "Treatment organisation", "Interaction client clinician", "The clinician", "Clinician's adherence to good practice", "Drug treatment", "Pre-condition", "Supporting activities", and "Supportive work and home life". Most clusters were considered important. These findings support the idea of using multivariate and multimodal models for understanding treatment success. Participants attributed the therapeutic alliance as more clinician-driven than client-driven. A combination of factors related to treatment organization, treatment elements, and guideline adherence emerged as a core concept to successful treatment. Recommendations include increasing clinician awareness of perceptions of the therapeutic alliance and utilizing the findings to guide treatment discussions.

Change blindness refers to the failure to detect significant changes in a visual scene when they coincide with a global visual transient, such as a saccade or a brief blank screen. This phenomenon highlights critical limitations in the healthy human perceptual system and underscores the distinction between sensation and perception. This review synthesizes current literature on change blindness, examining its underlying mechanisms in relation to perception, attention, memory, and top-down processing. We explore how visual representations are formed, maintained, and compared across disruptions, emphasizing the roles of working memory and attentional allocation. Additionally, the relationship between change blindness and inattentional blindness is discussed, with a focus on how attention modulates conscious perception. Findings from seminal studies, including those using gaze-contingent displays and dynamic stimuli, are integrated to illustrate how change blindness informs broader theories of visual cognition. The review concludes that change blindness is not merely a perceptual failure but a window into high-level cognitive processes, offering significant implications for understanding the architecture of visual awareness.

It has been proposed that both conscious and unconscious perception are associated with a feedforward sweep of oscillatory activity in the gamma band (>40 Hz), while conscious perception also requires recurrent feedback via beta band (sim20 Hz) oscillations. To investigate the causal relationship between these oscillations and (un)conscious visual perception, we assessed the effect of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) in the gamma (40 Hz) and beta (20 Hz) bands on the objective and subjective visibility of targets in a metacontrast backward masking task. To capture different aspects of visual experience, we measured objective visibility: participants’ ability to correctly categorize the masked stimulus, and subjective visibility: participants’ self-report of whether they consciously perceived the stimulus. We expected that 40hz-tACS would affect both the objective visibility and subjective visibility. Moreover, we expected that 20 Hz-tACS would selectively affect the subjective visibility. Our results showed that target visibility was selectively compromised by 20 Hz-tACS but, in contrast to our hypothesis, this effect was specific to objective visibility. Although the power of local beta oscillations increased after 20 Hz-tACS, inter-areal beta synchrony could have nevertheless been impaired, a possibility that should be investigated in the future by means of source reconstructed high density electroencephalography recordings. In summary, our findings suggest that 20 Hz tACS may modulate target visibility, indicating a potential relationship between beta-band activity and visual perception. Future studies could build upon this result by investigating other forms of stimulation and other model organisms, further contributing to our knowledge of how conscious access causally depends on brain oscillations.

The priority of cultural values, along with the individual`s moral-psychological development and creative-emotional attitude toward the world, ensures the stable development of society. A significant role is given to supplementary art education institutions in developing the spiritual culture of the younger generation. They are intended to acquaint children with aesthetic values, develop their creative abilities, and shape positive value orientations. The objective of music pedagogy is to develop learners' competencies that enable conscious perception and performance of music. Systematic and purposeful instruction in this area creates favorable conditions for mastering musical elements and fostering their further development. Music, as a form of art, has great spiritual and moral potential, serves as a means of aesthetically comprehending life, and reflects the diversity of life phenomena, contributing to the artistic understanding of the world. Musical activity is distinguished by its unique characteristics and presupposes the presence of a number of qualities necessary for its realization: innate musical inclinations, emotional sensitivity and receptivity, a well-developed psychomotor domain, musical abilities, and so on. This article emphasizes the importance of musical hearing, the development of which is achieved through abilities.

This study investigates the retention of visual information in visual working memory (VWM) when individuals are unaware of it, aiming to provide clear-cut evidence for an unconscious VWM effect. To explore the underlying neural mechanisms, we monitored a critical ERP component, specifically the contralateral delay activity (CDA), which reflects VWM maintenance. Participants performed a change detection task in which to-be-memorized Gabor patches were presented at a visibility threshold, determined to assess subjective awareness using the Perceptual Awareness Scale. Participants performed above chance level in the change detection task even when the visibility of the Gabor patches was subthreshold, indicating retention of visual information without conscious awareness. Notably, in a subsample of participants, a reliable CDA amplitude was observed during unaware trials, in which participants performed correctly, compared to trials with incorrect responses. As a proof of concept, this finding indexed short active maintenance of unaware visual information in VWM, which could be used to perform VWM-based tasks. In conclusion, the results of our study support the existence of an active retention of unaware visual information in VWM. These findings challenge the notion of entirely activity-silent working memory by showing that unconscious information is maintained through active neural firing (CDA), potentially transitioning to activity-silent mechanisms in later phases.

The rapid growth of conversational AI transforms human–AI interactions. Understanding users’ perceptions and attitudes toward AI is crucial but remains underexplored, especially regarding perceived AI consciousness. This research examines the impact of interaction modality (text vs. voice) on users’ perceived AI consciousness and their moral performance toward AI chatbots. To this end, a series of controlled experiments were conducted with 25 participants interacting with ChatGPT in both text and voice modes. Results show that voice interactions significantly increase perceived AI consciousness and lead to greater politeness in users’ performance during conversations with AI chatbots. However, perceived AI consciousness does not significantly affect politeness performance. The findings underscore the role of interaction modality in shaping users’ perceptions and behaviors, highlighting a more direct link between modality and politeness performance. This work provides insights for the design of more socially engaging multimodal AI systems.

Our theories stemming from perception, memory, and neurology came to similar and complementary conclusions regarding the mechanism of conscious brain processes. We suggest that consciousness is the explicit memory of past events or the general cognitive capacity to simulate events, whether used to consciously remember the past, experience the present, or imagine the future. Perceptual mechanisms may represent an ongoing, editable, "best estimate" of our past, present, and future. In fact, at milliseconds to seconds timescales, there may be no hard boundary between perception and memory. We view conscious perceptions, decisions, and actions as simulations of prior unconscious sensations, decisions, and actions. As consciousness is the simulation/explicit memory of past events, the neural correlates of consciousness may therefore be the neural correlates of simulation/explicit memory. Because the default mode network, along with the frontoparietal control and salience networks, is critical for simulation/explicit memory, it is likely critical for normal consciousness. Each aspect of consciousness (e.g., visual, auditory, decision-making) may have its own neural correlate. Lastly, by combining our three theories, our synthesis can shed light on conscious perceptions, decisions, and actions in timescales ranging from subsecond to seconds, minutes, days, months, and years.

Emojis have become integral to digital communication, yet their impact on downstream cognitive processing is not fully understood. In two lexical decision experiments, we examined the behavioral and electrophysiological effects of emoji primes that varied by emotional valence (positive, neutral, negative) and face-status (face vs. non-face). Experiment 1, where clearly visible primes were presented for 100 ms, revealed a positivity advantage, with positive emojis facilitating responses and modulating both early (P1) and late (LPP) ERP components, along with a response-locked positivity indicating enhanced motor preparation. Negative emojis elicited early (P1, P2) ERP modulations but did not significantly alter behavior. Face emojis also increased early perceptual components (P1, P2/P3a), suggesting that face-like properties capture attention automatically. Experiment 2 employed continuous flash suppression (CFS) to limit conscious prime perception. Under these conditions, positive emojis no longer facilitated responses, and face-status effects disappeared. Negative emojis, however, showed robust early negativities in the ERPs and a trend toward slower response times, consistent with the automatic vigilance account. Overall, the findings indicate that conscious perception is crucial for the positivity advantage of emojis to manifest, whereas negative stimuli can still engage early neural processes and inhibit performance under limited conscious processing.

Representationalism is the theory that our conscious perception of the world is mediated by mental representations, rather than being a direct encounter with reality. In this article, we define representations in terms of a unified theory of long-term memory that incorporates both its explicit and implicit divisions. Apart from these integrative features, the theory offers the possibility for reconciling perspectives in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. We address various areas of debate, focusing on concepts such as consciousness, intentionality, emergence, and qualia. We draw the following conclusions based on our framework applied to representational systems. First, conscious experience results from the retrieval of the contents of explicit memory representations from short-term memory. Regarding intentionality, the strong link between intentionality and memory representations allows us to define intentionality, capturing both the “what is it” and “what it is like” aspects. Finally, notions referring to the subjective experiential content of consciousness, such as emergence and “qualia”, are integral to all conscious experience, reflecting memory-emotion interactions realized in neuro-affective networks. Ultimately, we conclude that concepts from the philosophy of mind can be harmonized, in a non-reductionist way, with neurocognitive theories that define memory representations as multilevel networks of large-scale brain systems.