School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; Department of Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Will Mithen
School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Hinze Hogendoorn
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
School of Psychological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; Center for Information and Neural Networks (CiNet), National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Suita, Japan; Advanced Telecommunications Research Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Seika-cho, Soraku-gun, Kyoto, Japan
Research on the neural basis of conscious perception has almost exclusively shown that becoming aware of a stimulus leads to increased neural responses. By designing a novel form of perceptual filling-in (PFI) overlaid with a dynamic texture display, we frequency-tagged multiple disappearing targets as well as their surroundings. We show that in a PFI paradigm, the disappearance of a stimulus and subjective invisibility is associated with increases in neural activity, as measured with steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs), in electroencephalography (EEG). We also find that this increase correlates with alpha-band activity, a well-established neural measure of attention. These findings cast doubt on the direct relationship previously reported between the strength of neural activity and conscious perception, at least when measured with current tools, such as the SSVEP. Instead, we conclude that SSVEP strength more closely measures changes in attention.
