An Adversarial Collaboration about the Nerual Basis of Perception and Mental imagery
Project Description
This research will uses neuroimaging (fMRI), psychophysics (in person and online), computational modeling, and machine learning to arbitrate among competing hypotheses about the neural mechanisms of conscious awareness. This project is part of an adversarial collaboration funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) through their Accelerating Research on Consciousness initiative to empirically evaluate different higher-order theories of consciousness. You can read more about this project following these links:
Templeton Accelerating Research on Consciousness Initiative (Project 6)
The overarching goal of the project is to arbitrate between four higher order theories: Higher-Order State Space model (HOSS; Fleming, 2020), Perceptual Reality Monitoring theory (PRM; Lau, 2019), Higher-Order Representation of a Representation (HOROR; Brown, 2015), and Self-Organising Meta-Representational theory (SOMA; Cleeremans, 2011; Cleeremans et al., 2020). The disagreement within Higher Order Theories of consciousness (HOTs) varies along two axes. One axis examines to what degree higher-order representations are rich or sparse. A second (related) axis of disagreement is on whether higher-order representations can “misrepresent” their first-order targets, and in what way. The two axes of disagreement will be tested in distinct experiments with a number of convergent methodologies. HOTs hypotheses cross-cut a number of different theories, with different theorists placing greater or lesser weight on the two axes. We seek to devise experiments that can identify whether the data are more consistent with one or other pole of these two axes.
In particular, this project involves experiments designed to provide a critical test of 1) whether perceptual/imagery vividness is coded in a rich or sparse manner, and 2) whether the nature of perceptual experience (“seeing” vs. “imagining”) relies on a dedicated higher-order reality monitoring signal (PRM), or whether inference on reality depends on thresholding a unidimensional code for phenomenal magnitude (HOSS).
Overall project personnel:
- Lead PIs: Stephen Fleming and Axel Cleeremans
- Project PIs: Jorge Morales, Megan Peters, Nadine Dijkstra, Rachel Denison, Zoltan Dienes, Guy Cheron
- Scientific steering committee: Hakwan Lau, Richard Brown, Stephen Fleming, Axel Cleeremans, Elisabeth Pacherie
- External advisory board: David Rosenthal, Matthias Michel, Joseph LeDoux, Lucie Charles