Reconciling current approaches to blindsight

Morten Overgaard; Jesper Mogensen

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2014.08.003

Reconciling current approaches to blindsight

Conscious Cogn. 2015 Mar:32:33-40. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2014.08.003. Epub 2014 Aug 27.

Authors

Morten Overgaard¹, Jesper Mogensen²

Affiliations

¹ CNRU, CFIN, MindLab, Aarhus University, Denmark; CCN, Dept. of Psychology and Communication, Aalborg University, Denmark. Electronic address: mortover@rm.dk.
² The Unit for Cognitive Neuroscience (UCN), Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

PMID: 25172329
DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2014.08.003

Abstract

After decades of research, blindsight is still a mysterious and controversial topic in consciousness research. Currently, many researchers tend to think of it as an ideal phenomenon to investigate neural correlates of consciousness, whereas others believe that blindsight is in fact a kind of degraded vision rather than "truly blind". This article considers both perspectives and finds that both have difficulties understanding all existing evidence about blindsight. In order to reconcile the perspectives, we suggest two specific criteria for a good model of blindsight, able to encompass all evidence. We propose that the REF-CON model (Overgaard & Mogensen, 2014) may work as such a model.

Keywords: Blindsight; Brain injury; Consciousness; REF; REF-CON.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
Review

MeSH terms

Blindness / physiopathology*
Consciousness / physiology*
Humans
Models, Neurological*
Visual Perception / physiology*