Event overview
When people consciously perceive visual stimuli, they consciously perceive aspects of the outside world. When scientists consider the problem of conscious perception, they must understand this outside world visual information this is consciously perceived. So, the visual information underlying conscious experience of a stimulus has remained a challenging philosophical and empirical problem. Using the Bubbles technique, we uncovered this information content in observers who consciously perceived each interpretation of the ambiguous Dali painting "Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire." For each individual observer, we isolated the stimulus features underlying their overt judgments of the input as "the nuns" and "Voltaire" (i.e. the two possible perceptions of the ambiguous painting. Every 2 ms between stimulus onset and over response, we derived the sensitivity of the observer's oscillatory activity (in the theta, alpha and beta bandwidths) to these features. Then, in each bandwidth, we estimated the moments (between stimulus onset and perceptual judgment) when perception-specific features were maximally integrated, corresponding to perceptual moments. We show that centro-parietal beta oscillations support the perceptual moments underlying the conscious perception of the nuns, whereas theta oscillations support the perception of Voltaire. For both perceptions, we reveal the specific information content of these perceptual moments.
Prof. Philippe G. Schyns is Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. He researches visual cognition from a computational, behavioural and brain imaging perspectives. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Associate Editor of Psychological Science.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Feb 2009 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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