Dehaene et al - Conscious, preconscious, and subliminal processing

Maintains thalamocortical systems in a receptive state, lowering threshold for sensory inputs. More cerebral blood flow in brainstem and thalamus. ‘states of vigilance’ to refer to the non-transitive meaning, i.e. a continuum of states which encompasses wakefulness, sleep, coma, anesthesia, etc.

Event-related potentials show similar responses for invisible and visible words, indicating consciousness depends on attention.

Increased activity in parietal, prefrontal, and anterior cingulate areas correlates with conscious perception in brain scans.

Occurs when stimuli lack sufficient bottom-up activation, leading to inaccessible information.

Involves potential for conscious access but remains unnoticed due to lack of attention.

Subliminal priming persists with temporal attention but vanishes without it.

Modulates unconscious processing, as shown by experiments with blindsight patients.

Contrasts between masked and unmasked stimuli reveal differences in subliminal and conscious processing.

Even when attended, stimuli at sensory threshold may vary in perception, highlighting contrasts between subliminal and conscious stimuli.

Knowledge stored latently remains inaccessible until it triggers neural firing.

Aspects of the visual scene must be represented by neurons with unambiguous firing, amplified by top-down attention for conscious accessibility.

Information remains non-conscious if relevant neurons lack bidirectional projections, preventing assembly with parietal and prefrontal cortices.