​Psychology Seminar | Causes, Consequences and Neural Correlates of Visual Awareness

All are welcome to attend the seminar.

How conscious experience is realized in neuronal activity is one major unsolved problem in neuroscience. Brain scientists have focused on finding neural correlates of consciousness for over two decades. Here I go beyond this correlational paradigm and use fMRI multivariate pattern analysis to investigate the causal relationship between cortical activity and visual awareness. First, I examined the neural consequences of consciousness by asking whether the pattern of neural activity in visual cortex can be altered by a change in the interpretation of a constant visual input. Second, I examined the neural causes of consciousness by asking whether the contents of visual awareness during binocular rivalry can be biased/predicted by the neural activation pattern that immediately precedes binocular stimulus presentation. My results show that the pattern of neural activity in visual cortex not only reflects changes of subjects’ conscious interpretation of the stimulus, but also predicts subjects’ subsequent perceptual states during binocular rivalry. These finding go beyond mere correlates of consciousness to reveal candidates in areas that are casually involved in realizing conscious experience. 

Dr Po-Jang (Brown) Hsieh received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College, USA in 2008, and was a research scientist at MIT until 2011. He is now an Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. He is interested in understanding how the human brain is able to perceive and experience the world. He studies the human neural bases of perception, attention, and consciousness with EEG, functional brain imaging (fMRI), neural decoding methods, and psychophysical techniques. ​