A/Professor Naotsugu Tsuchiya, VIC : "Conscious perception and its neural substrate: integration and dynamics"
Speaker:
A/Professor Naotsugu Tsuchiya
School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University, VIC 3168
Title: "Conscious perception and its neural substrate: integration and dynamics"
Abstract: Conscious perception is supported by neural activities in the brain. However, which exact types of neural activities relate to consciousness have been controversial. Are coherent, synchronous or integrated neural activities necessary (or sufficient) for a given aspect of sensory processing to give rise to consciousness? Is is possible that any proposed activity type is actually less related to consciousness per se but rather it is more related to other types of cognitive processes, such as attention and expectation? Can we distinguish such possibilities? One of the potential reasons of the controversies is due to a lack of proper methodology, which is well theoretically well backed up.
To address these issues, we have developed various experimental paradigms, that utilized rhythmic sensory stimulation, sometimes called, steady state evoked potentials (SSEP). By combining several rhythmic stimulation, while we record neural activities in humans, we have been addressing the following questions: Is integration of neural activity related to conscious perception, attention or expectation? Does the rhythmic activity in the brain reflect the rhythms of conscious perception or other cognitive processes (e.g., attention)?
In the context of understanding these issues, we would need to discuss various finding of the rhythmic stimulation paradigms in animal models, ranging from flies, cats, to monkeys. Such comparative, cross-modal and interdisciplinary researches will hopefully crack the codes for the mystery of the neural substrate of our conscious experience in the future.
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