The SSVEP tracks attention, not consciousness, during perceptual filling-in
- Oxford University, Australia
- Monash University, Australia
- University of Melbourne, Australia
- University of Canberra, Australia
Abstract
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 are associated with increases in neural activity, as measured with steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP), 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.
Data availability
All data and analysis code has been made available in a repository on the open science framework.
Article and author information
Author details
Matthew J Davidson
Jeroen JA van Boxtel
Funding
ARC (FT120100619)
- Naotsugu Tsuchiya
ARC (DP130100194)
- Naotsugu Tsuchiya
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Ethics approval was obtained from the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee (MUHREC #CF12/2542 - 2012001375).Students at Monash University, provided written informed consent prior to taking part
Copyright
© 2020, Davidson et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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The SSVEP tracks attention, not consciousness, during perceptual filling-in
eLife 9:e60031.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60031
