25 found
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  1. How (not) to underestimate unconscious perception.Matthias Michel - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (2):413-430.
    Studying consciousness requires contrasting conscious and unconscious perception. While many studies have reported unconscious perceptual effects, recent work has questioned whether such effects are genuinely unconscious, or whether they are due to weak conscious perception. Some philosophers and psychologists have reacted by denying that there is such a thing as unconscious perception, or by holding that unconscious perception has been previously overestimated. This article has two parts. In the first part, I argue that the most significant attack on unconscious perception (...)
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  2. Confidence in Consciousness Research.Matthias Michel - 2023 - WIREs Cognitive Science 14 (2):e1628.
    To study (un)conscious perception and test hypotheses about consciousness, researchers need procedures for determining whether subjects consciously perceive stimuli or not. This article is an introduction to a family of procedures called ‘confidence-based procedures’, which consist in interpreting metacognitive indicators as indicators of consciousness. I assess the validity and accuracy of these procedures, and answer a series of common objections to their use in consciousness research. I conclude that confidence-based procedures are valid for assessing consciousness, and, in most cases, accurate (...)
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  3. Fish and microchips: on fish pain and multiple realization.Matthias Michel - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 176 (9):2411-2428.
    Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common counter-argument appeals to the multiple realizability of pain: while a neocortex might be necessary for feeling pain in humans, pain might be realized differently in fish. This paper argues, first, that it is impossible to find a criterion allowing us to demarcate between plausible and implausible cases of multiple realization of pain (...)
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  4. How Should We Study Animal Consciousness Scientifically?Jonathan Birch, Donald M. Broom, Heather Browning, Andrew Crump, Simona Ginsburg, Marta Halina, David Harrison, Eva Jablonka, Andrew Y. Lee, François Kammerer, Colin Klein, Victor Lamme, Matthias Michel, Françoise Wemelsfelder & Oryan Zacks - 2022 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (3-4):8-28.
    This editorial introduces the Journal of Consciousness Studies special issue on "Animal Consciousness". The 15 contributors and co-editors answer the question "How should we study animal consciousness scientifically?" in 500 words or fewer.
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  5. The Mismeasure of Consciousness: A problem of coordination for the Perceptual Awareness Scale.Matthias Michel - 2018 - Philosophy of Science (5):1239-1249.
    As for most measurement procedures in the course of their development, measures of consciousness face the problem of coordination, i.e., the problem of knowing whether a measurement procedure actually measures what it is intended to measure. I focus on the case of the Perceptual Awareness Scale to illustrate how ignoring this problem leads to ambiguous interpretations of subjective reports in consciousness science. In turn, I show that empirical results based on this measurement procedure might be systematically misinterpreted.
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  6. Minority Reports: Consciousness and the Prefrontal Cortex.Matthias Michel & Jorge Morales - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (4):493-513.
    Whether the prefrontal cortex is part of the neural substrates of consciousness is currently debated. Against prefrontal theories of consciousness, many have argued that neural activity in the prefrontal cortex does not correlate with consciousness but with subjective reports. We defend prefrontal theories of consciousness against this argument. We surmise that the requirement for reports is not a satisfying explanation of the difference in neural activity between conscious and unconscious trials, and that prefrontal theories of consciousness come out of this (...)
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  7. Consciousness Science Underdetermined: A short history of endless debates.Matthias Michel - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.
    Consciousness scientists have not reached consensus on two of the most central questions in their field: first, on whether consciousness overflows reportability; second, on the physical basis of consciousness. I review the scientific literature of the 19th century to provide evidence that disagreement on these questions has been a feature of the scientific study of consciousness for a long time. Based on this historical review, I hypothesize that a unifying explanation of disagreement on these questions, up to this day, is (...)
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  8. The mnemonic basis of subjective experience.Hakwan Lau, Matthias Michel, Joseph LeDoux & Stephen Fleming - 2022 - Nature Reviews Psychology.
    Conscious experiences involve subjective qualities, such as colours, sounds, smells and emotions. In this Perspective, we argue that these subjective qualities can be understood in terms of their similarity to other experiences. This account highlights the role of memory in conscious experience, even for simple percepts. How an experience feels depends on implicit memory of the relationships between different perceptual representations within the brain. With more complex experiences such as emotions, explicit memories are also recruited. We draw inspiration from work (...)
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  9. Methodological Artefacts in Consciousness Science.Matthias Michel - 2017 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (11-12):94-117.
    Consciousness is scientifically challenging to study because of its subjective aspect. This leads researchers to rely on report-based experimental paradigms in order to discover neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs). I argue that the reliance on reports has biased the search for NCCs, thus creating what I call 'methodological artefacts'. This paper has three main goals: first, describe the measurement problem in consciousness science and argue that this problem led to the emergence of methodological artefacts. Second, provide a critical assessment of (...)
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  10.  50
    On the dangers of conflating strong and weak versions of a theory of consciousness.Matthias Michel & Hakwan Lau - 2020 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (II).
    Some proponents of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness profess strong views on the Neural Correlates of Consciousness, namely that large swathes of the neocortex, the cerebellum, at least some sensory cortices, and the so-called limbic system are all not essential for any form of conscious experiences. We argue that this connection is not incidental. Conflation between strong and weak versions of the theory has led these researchers to adopt definitions of NCC that are inconsistent with their own previous definitions, (...)
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  11. (1 other version)Calibration in Consciousness Science.Matthias Michel - 2021 - Erkenntnis (2):1-22.
    To study consciousness, scientists need to determine when participants are conscious and when they are not. They do so with consciousness detection procedures. A recurring skeptical argument against those procedures is that they cannot be calibrated: there is no way to make sure that detection outcomes are accurate. In this article, I address two main skeptical arguments purporting to show that consciousness scientists cannot calibrate detection procedures. I conclude that there is nothing wrong with calibration in consciousness science.
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  12. Validity Drifts in Psychiatric Research.Matthias Michel - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Psychiatric research is in crisis because of repeated failures to discover new drugs for mental disorders. Lack of measurement validity could partly account for these failures. If researchers do not actually measure the effects of drugs on the disorders they aim to investigate, one should expect suboptimal treatment outcomes. I argue that this is the case, focusing on depression, and fear & anxiety disorders. In doing so, I show how psychiatric research illustrates a more general phenomenon that I call “validity (...)
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  13. Conscious Perception and the Prefrontal Cortex A Review.Matthias Michel - 2022 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (7-8):115-157.
    Is perceptual processing in dedicated sensory areas sufficient for conscious perception? Localists say ‘Yes—given some background conditions.’ Prefrontalists say ‘No: conscious perceptual experience requires the involvement of prefrontal structures.’ I review the evidence for prefrontalism. I start by presenting correlational evidence. In doing so, I answer the ‘report argument’, according to which the apparent involvement of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness stems from the requirement for reports. I then review causal evidence for prefrontalism and answer the ‘lesion argument’, which purports (...)
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  14. A new empirical challenge for local theories of consciousness.Matthias Michel & Adrien Doerig - 2021 - Mind and Language 37 (5):840-855.
    Local theories of consciousness state that one is conscious of a feature if it is adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas, given some background conditions. We challenge the core prediction of local theories based on long-lasting postdictive effects demonstrating that features can be represented for hundreds of milliseconds in perceptual areas without being consciously perceived. Unlike previous empirical data aimed against local theories, localists cannot explain these effects away by conjecturing that subjects are phenomenally conscious of features that (...)
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  15. An Informal Internet Survey on the Current State of Consciousness Science.Matthias Michel, Stephen M. Fleming, Hakwan Lau, Alan L. F. Lee, Susana Martinez-Conde, Richard E. Passingham, Megan A. K. Peters, Dobromir Rahnev, Claire Sergent & Kayuet Liu - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment for the field to grow and develop sustainably. We conducted an online survey on people’s views regarding various aspects of the scientific study of consciousness as a field of (...)
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  16. A role for the anterior insular cortex in the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness.Matthias Michel - 2017 - Consciousness and Cognition 49:333-346.
    According to the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, consciousness results from the global broadcast of information throughout the brain. The global neuronal workspace is mainly constituted by a fronto-parietal network. The anterior insular cortex is part of this global neuronal workspace, but the function of this region has not yet been defined within the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness. In this review, I hypothesize that the anterior insular cortex implements a cross-modal priority map, the function of which is (...)
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  17.  81
    When visual metacognition fails: widespread anosognosia for visual deficits.Matthias Michel, Yi Gao, Matan Mazor, Isaiah Kletenik & Dobromir Rahnev - 2024 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
    Anosognosia for visual deficits—cases where significant visual deficits go unnoticed—challenges the view that our own conscious experiences are what we know best. We review these widespread and striking failures of awareness. Anosognosia can occur with total blindness, visual abnormalities induced by brain lesions, and eye diseases. We show that anosognosia for visual deficits is surprisingly widespread. Building on previous accounts, we introduce a framework showing how apparently disparate forms of anosognosia fit together. The central idea is that, to notice a (...)
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  18. The old and new criterion problems.Matthias Michel - 2023 - In Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan & Juraj Hvorecký (eds.), Conscious and Unconscious Mentality: Examining Their Nature, Similarities and Differences. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 130-154.
    Negative subjective reports such as “I didn’t see the stimulus” can be interpreted as indicating either that the subject didn’t see the stimulus, or as indicating that, while the subject did see the stimulus, the strength of sensory signals associated with the stimulus fell below a conservative criterion for answering “seen”. Determining which of these two interpretations is correct is the criterion problem. I present two ways in which researchers can solve this problem. But there’s more. What I call the (...)
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  19. A little history goes a long way toward understanding why we study consciousness the way we do today.Joseph LeDoux, Matthias Michel & Hakwan Lau - 2020 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 1.
    Consciousness is currently a thriving area of research in psychology and neuroscience. While this is often attributed to events that took place in the early 1990s, consciousness studies today are a continuation of research that started in the late 19th century and that continued throughout the 20th century. From the beginning, the effort built on studies of animals to reveal basic principles of brain organization and function, and of human patients to gain clues about consciousness itself. Particularly important and our (...)
     
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  20. The perceptual reality monitoring theory.Matthias Michel - forthcoming - In Michael Herzog, Aaron Schurger & Adrien Doerig (eds.), Scientific Theories of Consciousness: The Grand Tour. Cambridge University Press.
    This chapter presents the perceptual reality monitoring theory of consciousness (PRM). PRM is a higher-order theory of consciousness. It holds that consciousness involves monitoring the reliability of one’s own sensory signals. I explain how a perceptual reality monitoring mechanism computes the higher order representations that are crucial for consciousness. While PRM accounts for the difference between conscious and unconscious states, it does not explain, on its own, why experiences feel the way they do—the phenomenal character of experience. PRM is compatible (...)
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  21. Confirmation bias without rhyme or reason.Matthias Michel & Megan A. K. Peters - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2757-2772.
    Having a confirmation bias sometimes leads us to hold inaccurate beliefs. So, the puzzle goes: why do we have it? According to the influential argumentative theory of reasoning, confirmation bias emerges because the primary function of reason is not to form accurate beliefs, but to convince others that we’re right. A crucial prediction of the theory, then, is that confirmation bias should be found only in the reasoning domain. In this article, we argue that there is evidence that confirmation bias (...)
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  22. L'accointance entre omniscience et omnipotence.Matthias Michel - forthcoming - Klesis.
    Introspection is the capacity by which we know our own conscious mental states. Several theories aim to explain it. According to acquaintance theory, we know our experiences by being acquainted with them. Acquaintance is non-causal, non-inferential, and non-observational. I present a dilemma for the acquaintance theory of introspection. Either subjects are always acquainted with all their experiences; or some attentional mechanism selects the relevant experiences (or aspects of experiences) for introspection. The first option is implausible: it implies that subjects are (...)
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  23. Making Progress on the Prefrontal Debate.Matthias Michel & Rafael Malach - 2022 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 29 (7-8):158-164.
  24. Higher-order theories do just fine.Matthias Michel & Hakwan Lau - forthcoming - Cognitive Neuroscience.
    Doerig et al. have set several criteria that theories of consciousness need to fulfill. By these criteria, higher-order theories fare better than most existing theories. But they also argue that higher-order theories may not be able to answer both the ‘small network argument’ and the ‘other systems argument’. In response, we focus on the case of the Perceptual Reality Monitoring theory to explain why higher-order theories do just fine.
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  25. Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest, by Peter Carruthers. [REVIEW]Matthias Michel - 2021 - Philosophical Review 130 (4):619–623.