Mei Ning, Soto David
School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, No. 3688, Nanhai Avenue, Shenzhen 518060, China.
Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain.
J Cogn. 2025 Apr 28;8(1):34. doi: 10.5334/joc.443. eCollection 2025.
The development of robust frameworks to understand how the human brain represents conscious and unconscious perceptual contents is paramount to make progress in the neuroscience of consciousness. Recent functional MRI studies using multi-voxel pattern classification analyses showed that unconscious contents could be decoded from brain activity patterns. However, decoding does not imply a full understanding of neural representations. Here we re-analysed data from a high-precision fMRI study coupled with representational similarity analysis based on convolutional neural network models to provide a detailed information-based approach to neural representations of both unconscious and conscious perceptual content. The results showed that computer vision model representations strongly predicted brain responses in ventral visual cortex and in fronto-parietal regions to both conscious and unconscious contents. Moreover, this pattern of results generalised when the models were trained and tested with different participants. Remarkably, these observations results held even when the analysis was restricted to observers that showed null perceptual sensitivity. In light of the highly distributed brain representation of unconscious information, we suggest that the functional role of fronto-parietal cortex in conscious perception is unlikely to be related to the broadcasting of information, as proposed by the global neuronal workspace theory, and may instead relate to the generation of meta-representations as proposed by higher-order theories.
开发强大的框架以理解人类大脑如何表征有意识和无意识的感知内容，对于意识神经科学的进展至关重要。最近使用多体素模式分类分析的功能磁共振成像研究表明，无意识内容可以从大脑活动模式中解码出来。然而，解码并不意味着对神经表征有全面的理解。在这里，我们重新分析了一项高精度功能磁共振成像研究的数据，并结合基于卷积神经网络模型的表征相似性分析，以提供一种基于详细信息的方法来研究无意识和有意识感知内容的神经表征。结果表明，计算机视觉模型表征强烈预测了腹侧视觉皮层和额顶叶区域对有意识和无意识内容的大脑反应。此外，当模型用不同参与者进行训练和测试时，这种结果模式具有普遍性。值得注意的是，即使分析仅限于表现出零感知敏感性的观察者，这些观察结果仍然成立。鉴于无意识信息在大脑中的高度分布式表征，我们认为额顶叶皮层在有意识感知中的功能作用不太可能与全局神经元工作空间理论所提出的信息广播有关，而可能与高阶理论所提出的元表征的生成有关。
