A learning test procedure based on operant principles may be useful in the diagnosis (and eventually rehabilitation) of post-coma persons with minimal responsiveness. This study was aimed at extending the evaluation of such a procedure with seven participants who presented with very limited behavior and apparently severe disorders of consciousness. The procedure was evaluated through an ABACB d...

Working memory (WM) is closely linked to conscious awareness: In most conceptions of WM, the inputs to WM need to be conscious. The findings of some recent studies, however, have been taken to suggest that WM can indeed operate on non-conscious inputs. Here, we argue that these findings can easily be accommodated by conventional conceptions of non-conscious perception and conscious WM. We concl...

This paper is based, to a large part, on the review by Zeman [1]. It gives a short overview on investigations, which try to demonstrate that, in the eyes of some authors, local neural correlates of conscious brain activity do likely exist which supports a materialistic view of consciousness. Simultaneously, the paper tries to elucidate why these hints should be seen with caution and scepticism ...

Pessoa and colleagues recently reported the novel finding that objective awareness of a negative stimulus is associated with coactivation of the amygdala and fusiform gyrus. Based on the neuroanatomical connections of the amygdala, we suggest that the amygdala is acting to increase neural activity in the fusiform gyrus, thereby increasing the likelihood that visual representations that have aff...

Following a coma, some patients may "awaken" without voluntary interaction or communication with the environment. More than 40 years ago this condition was coined coma vigil or apallic syndrome and later became worldwide known as "persistent vegetative state". About 10 years ago it became clear that some of these patients who failed to recover verbal or non-verbal communication did show some de...

BACKGROUND High-frequency (e.g., gamma 30 to 50 Hz) coherent neural activity has been postulated to underlie binding of independent neural assemblies and thus integrate processing across distributed neuronal networks to achieve a unified conscious experience. Prior studies suggest that gamma activity may play a role in perceptual mechanisms, but design limitations raise concerns. Thus, controve...

27 28 Neural basis of consciousness and its suppression are typically studied by manipulating stimuli 29 around the conscious access threshold, or – alternatively – by contrasting conscious and 30 unconscious states (i.e. awake/sleep). Here we show that behavioural and neural markers of 31 conscious access are dependent on wakefulness state, and thus a comprehensive description of the 32 neural...