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© 2007 Del Cul et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited: Del Cul A, Baillet S, Dehaene S (2007) Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness. PLoS Biol 5(10): e260. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050260

Abstract

When a flashed stimulus is followed by a backward mask, subjects fail to perceive it unless the target-mask interval exceeds a threshold duration of about 50 ms. Models of conscious access postulate that this threshold is associated with the time needed to establish sustained activity in recurrent cortical loops, but the brain areas involved and their timing remain debated. We used high-density recordings of event-related potentials (ERPs) and cortical source reconstruction to assess the time course of human brain activity evoked by masked stimuli and to determine neural events during which brain activity correlates with conscious reports. Target-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was varied in small steps, allowing us to ask which ERP events show the characteristic nonlinear dependence with SOA seen in subjective and objective reports. The results separate distinct stages in mask-target interactions, indicating that a considerable amount of subliminal processing can occur early on in the occipito-temporal pathway (<250 ms) and pointing to a late (>270 ms) and highly distributed fronto-parieto-temporal activation as a correlate of conscious reportability.

Details

Title
Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness
Author
Cul, Antoine Del; Baillet, Sylvain; Dehaene, Stanislas
Pages
e260
Section
Research Article
Publication year
2007
Publication date
Oct 2007
Publisher
Public Library of Science
ISSN
15449173
e-ISSN
15457885
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1292309543
Copyright
© 2007 Del Cul et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited: Del Cul A, Baillet S, Dehaene S (2007) Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness. PLoS Biol 5(10): e260. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050260