Ciupińska Kinga, Koculak Marcin, Bola Michał, Wierzchoń Michał
Consciousness Lab, Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.
Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction (S4HRI), Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Italy.
Psychophysiology. 2025 Jul;62(7):e70099. doi: 10.1111/psyp.70099.
The majority of previous research on neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) have used the visual system as a model. However, to what extent reported findings generalize to other sensory modalities has not been comprehensively investigated. To fill this gap we directly compared visual and auditory NCCs by testing the same group of participants with two analogous procedures. Participants were presented with near-threshold visual and auditory stimuli followed by a detection task and Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS). On the behavioral level, as expected from visual awareness studies, PAS ratings were highly correlated with accuracy in the detection task. Analysis of EEG data revealed that analogous ERP components-early visual or auditory awareness negativity (VAN and AAN) were related to perceptual awareness, but regarding late positivity (LP), it was related to perceptual awareness only in the visual modality. Further, we found that VAN and visual LP exhibited shorter latencies than respective auditory components suggesting earlier access of visual stimuli to consciousness, compared to auditory ones. Finally, neither estimated perceptual thresholds nor amplitudes and latencies of the awareness-related ERPs components were correlated between modalities, suggesting a lack of a close link between visual and auditory perceptual mechanisms. Therefore, the observed differences between visual and auditory modalities indicate the investigated NCC are rather modality-specific, and thus that neither of the proposed measures track consciousness independently to the content-related processing.
先前关于意识神经关联物（NCC）的大多数研究都将视觉系统作为模型。然而，已报告的研究结果在多大程度上适用于其他感觉模态尚未得到全面研究。为了填补这一空白，我们通过用两种类似的程序测试同一组参与者，直接比较了视觉和听觉NCC。向参与者呈现接近阈值的视觉和听觉刺激，随后进行检测任务和感知觉意识量表（PAS）测试。在行为层面上，正如视觉意识研究预期的那样，PAS评分与检测任务的准确性高度相关。脑电图数据分析表明，类似的事件相关电位成分——早期视觉或听觉意识负波（VAN和AAN）与感知觉意识相关，但关于晚期正波（LP），它仅在视觉模态中与感知觉意识相关。此外，我们发现VAN和视觉LP的潜伏期比各自的听觉成分短，这表明与听觉刺激相比，视觉刺激更早进入意识。最后，各模态之间估计的感知阈值以及与意识相关的事件相关电位成分的幅度和潜伏期均无相关性，这表明视觉和听觉感知机制之间缺乏紧密联系。因此，视觉和听觉模态之间观察到的差异表明所研究的NCC具有相当的模态特异性，因此所提出的测量方法都不能独立于与内容相关的处理来追踪意识。
