Identifying content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness

Benjy Barnett; Lau M Andersen; Stephen M Fleming; Nadine Dijkstra

doi:10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae061

Identifying content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness

PNAS Nexus. 2024 Feb 14;3(2):pgae061. doi: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae061. eCollection 2024 Feb.

Authors

Benjy Barnett^{1

2}, Lau M Andersen^{3

4

5}, Stephen M Fleming^{1

2

6}, Nadine Dijkstra¹

Affiliations

¹ Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, UK.
² Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London WC1H 0AP, UK.
³ Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
⁴ Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
⁵ Department for Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
⁶ Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London WC1B 5EH, UK.

Abstract

Some conscious experiences are more vivid than others. Although perceptual vividness is a key component of human consciousness, how variation in this magnitude property is registered by the human brain is unknown. A striking feature of neural codes for magnitude in other psychological domains, such as number or reward, is that the magnitude property is represented independently of its sensory features. To test whether perceptual vividness also covaries with neural codes that are invariant to sensory content, we reanalyzed existing magnetoencephalography and functional MRI data from two distinct studies which quantified perceptual vividness via subjective ratings of awareness and visibility. Using representational similarity and decoding analyses, we find evidence for content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness distributed across visual, parietal, and frontal cortices. Our findings indicate that the neural correlates of subjective vividness may share similar properties to magnitude codes in other cognitive domains.

Keywords: MEG; awareness; fMRI; perception.