Dartmouth Events

Neural Mechanisms of Conscious Visual Perception
Abstract: Despite intense interests and research over the past three decades, the neural mechanisms of conscious visual perception remain a mystery. In this talk, I will give an overview of our recent work tackling this fundamental question. Using a combination of high temporal resolution and high spatial resolution techniques to record from the human brain, and employing multiple perceptual paradigms, we have found that: I) Conscious perception likely requires the coordination of large-scale brain dynamics across multiple brain networks, including both content-specific cortical activity and non-content-specific subcortical activity. II) The preexisting brain state, including both the connectivity patterns reflecting past experiences and the moment-to-moment spontaneous activity fluctuations, strongly shapes conscious perception. In addition, I will discuss the implications of these findings for theories of conscious perception.