CIMeC-Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
Perception and Awareness (PandA) Laboratory, Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, Italy.
Sci Rep. 2019 Mar 20;9(1):4949. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-41024-4.
How neural representations of low-level visual information are accessed by higher-order processes to inform decisions and give rise to conscious experience is a longstanding question. Research on perceptual decision making has revealed a late event-related EEG potential (the Centro-Parietal Positivity, CPP) to be a correlate of the accumulation of sensory evidence. We tested how this evidence accumulation signal relates to externally presented (physical) and internally experienced (subjective) sensory evidence. Our results show that the known relationship between the physical strength of the external evidence and the evidence accumulation signal (reflected in the CPP amplitude) is mediated by the level of subjective experience of stimulus strength. This shows that the CPP closely tracks the subjective perceptual evidence, over and above the physically presented evidence. We conclude that a remarkably close relationship exists between the evidence accumulation process (i.e. CPP) and subjective perceptual experience, suggesting that neural decision processes and components of conscious experience are tightly linked.
低水平视觉信息的神经表示如何被更高阶的过程访问，以告知决策并产生意识体验，这是一个长期存在的问题。关于感知决策的研究揭示了晚期事件相关的 EEG 电位（中央顶正波，CPP）是感官证据积累的相关指标。我们测试了这种证据积累信号与外部呈现（物理）和内部体验（主观）的感官证据之间的关系。我们的结果表明，外部证据的物理强度与证据积累信号（反映在 CPP 幅度上）之间的已知关系是由刺激强度的主观体验水平介导的。这表明 CPP 密切跟踪主观感知证据，超过了物理呈现的证据。我们得出结论，证据积累过程（即 CPP）与主观感知体验之间存在着非常密切的关系，这表明神经决策过程和意识体验的组成部分紧密相连。
