Symposium 4: Detecting covert awareness

Monday July 15 16:30-18:30

Ethical implications of detecting covert awareness in disorders of consciousness

Chairs: Adrian M. Owen (Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging, Western University, Ontario, CA),
Andrew Peterson (Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University, Ontario, CA)

Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience (Monti et al .2010, Owen et al.2006) suggest that functional mag- netic resonance imaging (fMRI) may be a viable means for detecting covert awareness in the vegetative state (VS). This research opens a promising new avenue for developing brain-computer interfaces (Naci et al. 2012) that compliment the current diagnostic criteria of disorders of consciousness (DOC), thereby increasing the effectiveness of diagnostic screening in this patient group. Given the high rate of misdiagno- sis in this population (Andrews et al. 1996, Childs et al. 1993), actively seeking out patients, who retain conscious awareness despite a clinical diagnosis of VS, is of the highest importance. Moreover, this tech- nique may also permit patients, who are consciously aware and have high levels of preserved cognition, to meaningfully engage in the decision making process related to their own medical care. To date, one patient, previously diagnosed as vegetative for approximately five years, was able to successfully answer a series of autobiographical ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions correctly overrepeated fMRI scanning sessions (Montietal.2010).

A natural step forward in this research program, therefore, is to apply similar neuroimaging methods to address medical questions relevant to individual DOC patients (Peterson et al. in preparation). Though these scientific findings appear highly promising in principle, incorporating any neuroimaging--based method into clinical setting will require satisfaction of established ethical and legal norms of medical practice. In particular, these concerns include: determining how information acquired from such techniques will be disclosed to patients’ families, what the cost of running such tests will be, whether any individual DOC patient is capable of making medically relevant decisions with these techniques, and what type of ques- tions we ought to be asking this patient population. We propose a symposium that brings together three different perspectives on this problem: neuroscience, neurology, and clinical ethics.

The first perspective, offered by Drs. Lorina Naci PhD and Daniel Bor PhD, both neuroscientists working with these neuroimaging paradigms, will shed light on practical obstacles and ways forward focusing neuroimaging to assess residual cognition in DOC patients.

The second perspective, offered by Dr. Bryan Young MD, a clinical neurologist working directly with this patient group, will highlight the difficulties as well as the potential that neuroim- aging holds for DOC patients in the medical setting.

Finally, Dr. Charles Weijer MD, PhD and Andrew Peterson MA, both medical ethicists and philosophers of science, will offer views on the overarching ethical standards relevant to this research. Dr. Adrian M. Owen, a neuroscientist working in this field, will chair the session.

We hope that this interdisciplinary approach will facilitate a novel and productive conversation about the merits of this research and future directions for using it in the clinical setting.

Using fMRI to assess conscious awareness in patients with disorders of consciousness– practical considerations
Lorina Naci (Experimental Psychology, Western University, Ontario, CA)

Using multiple neuroimaging techniques to assess the quality of conscious awareness in DOC patients
Daniel Bor (Cognitive Neuroscience, Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K.)

Obstacles at the interface between advances in cognitive neuroscience and clinical practice
Bryan Young (Neurology and Critical Care Medicine, Western University, Ontario, CA)
Conceptual foundations for assessing decision-making capacity in disorders of consciousness
Andrew Peterson (Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University, Ontario, CA)

Navigating the transition between research and treatment when integrating novel neuroimaging techniques in medical practice
Charles Weijer (Bioethics, Rotman Institute of Philosophy, Western University, Ontario, CA)

Sessions 3.3: Miscellaneous

Monday July 15 12:30-14:30

Concurrent Session C3.3: Miscellaneous

1. Using Training to Simulate Synaesthesia in Adulthood
Daniel Bor [1,2], Nicolas Rothen [1,3], David Schwartzman [1,2], Stephanie Clayton [1], Jamie Ward[1,3], Anil Seth [1,2]
[1] Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, United Kingdom
[2] Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, United Kingdom
[3] Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, United Kingdom

2. The cortical excitability and neurochemical markers of visual cognition in synaesthesia
D. B. Terhune & R. Cohen Kadosh
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

3. A neural marker of perceptual consciousness in infants
Sid Kouider [1,2], Carsten Stahlhut [2], Sofie V. Gelskov [1,3], Leonardo S. Barbosa [1], Michel Dutat [1], Vincent de Gardelle [1], Anne Christophe [1], Stanislas Dehaene [4-7], and Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz [5-7]
[1] Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, EHESS/CNRS/ENS-DEC, Paris, France
[2] Section for Cognitive Systems, Department of informatics and mathematical modeling, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark
[3] Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance, Copenhagen University Hospital, Hvidovre, Denmark
[4] Collège de France, 75231 Paris, France
[5] INSERM, U992, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
[6] CEA, NeuroSpin Center, 91191, Gif-sur-Yvette, France
[7] Université Paris XI, 91405, Orsay, France

4. Seeing with your heart: Can you feel what you consciously do not notice?
Piotr Winkielman [1], Boris Bornemann [2], Andy Arnold [3]
[1] University of California, San Diego
[2] Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
[3] The Salk Institute

5. Do subjective, objective and indirect measures of perception reflect qualitatively different mechanisms?
Dominique Lamy
Cognitive Psychology, Tel Aviv University

6. Measuring the level of consciousness in flies with integrated information
Naotsugu Tsuchiya [1,6], Dror Cohen [1], Agelique Paulk [2], Masafumi Oizumi [3,4], Paul Shaw [5], Bruno van Swinderen [2]
[1] Monash University, Australia
[2] University of Queensland, Australia
[3] RIKEN, Japan
[4] University of Wisconsin, USA
[5] Washington University, [6] Japan Science and Technology Agency, Japan

Sessions 3.2: Consciousness, self, and unity

Monday July 15 12:30-14:30

Concurrent Session C3.2: Consciousness, Self and Unity (July 15th 1230-1430)

1. Re-Thinking the Unity of Consciousness
Robert van Gulick
Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Syracuse University

2. Attention and the Problem of Unity
Carolyn Dicey Jennings
University of Antwerp

3. From Darwin to Freud: Confabulation as an adaptive response to dysfunctions of self-consciousness
Paula Droege
Pennsylvania State University

4. Intersection of perception and cognition & cross-modal experiences: New insights into unified consciousness
Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz
Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan

5. I am what I am
Shimon Edelman [1], Tomer Fekete [2]
[1] Dept. of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
[2] Dept. of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel

6. Tracking Persons Over Time is Tracking What?
Andrew Brook
Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Carleton University

Sessions 3.1: Consciousness, access, and subjective confidence

Monday July 15 12:30-14:30

Concurrent Session C3.1: Consciousness, Access, and Subjective Confidence (July 15th 1230-1430)

1. Categorical judgments in visual overflow
Ken Mogi
Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Tokyo

2. Expectations accelerate entry into awareness
Yair Pinto [1], Anil K. Seth [1], Simon van Gaal [2], Victor A.F. Lamme [2], Floris P. de Lange [3]
[1] Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
[2] Brain and Cognition group, Psychology department, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
[3] Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

3. Generic Phenomenology and Partial Report Paradigms
Henry Shevlin
Graduate Center of the City University of New York

4. Cross-modal prediction changes the timing of conscious access during the motion-induced blindness
Acer Yu-Chan Chang [1,2], Ryota Kanai [1,3], Anil Seth [1,2]
[1] Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK
[2] Department of Informatisc, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QJ, UK
[3] Department of Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, UK


5. Subliminal oddball ERP effects: Psychophysiological evidence for complex unconscious processing
Brian Silverstein [1], Michael Snodgrass [1], Ramesh Kushwaha [2], Howard Shevrin [1]
[1] Department of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Health Center
[2] Department of Neurology, University of Michigan Hospital

6. The effect of stimulus strength on subjective confidence
Stephen M. Fleming [1,2], W.S. Sophie Tam [3], Laurence T. Maloney [1,3]
[1] Center for Neural Science, New York University
[2] Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
[3] Department of Psychology, New York University

Symposium 3: Beyond the contrastive method

Monday July 15 09:30-11:30

Beyond the contrastive method: How to separate the neural correlates of consciousness from its precursors and consequences

Chair: Lucia Melloni (Dep’t of Neurophysiology, MPI Frankfurt, DE/Columbia University)

The most prevalent approach to study the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) today is to contrast conditions in which conscious perception occurs with conditions in which it does not. Here, conscious- ness is treated as the dependent variable and then correlated with brain activity. This “contrastive method” has brought about important insights into the NCC. However, despite this apparently straight- forward approach, results are inconclusive and contradictory (e.g., it is still debated whether the NCC occurs early or late, or whether it is expressed in local or distributed brain activity). This discord can be understood when considering a methodological pitfall in the contrastive method: The contrast between conscious perception and unconscious processing confounds the NCC with processes that necessarily precede and follow conscious perception (pre-NCC and post-NCC, respectively) without directly contrib- uting to subjective experience.

It is not straightforward to arbitrate which previous results address the NCC-proper and which reflect other processes. In this symposium we will outline the shortcomings of the contrastive analysis, put forward a new taxonomy that differentiates the processes besetting the NCC- proper, and propose novel experimental approaches to dissociate the NCC-proper from its antecedents and consequences. We review M-EEG and ECOG studies that have employed these new approaches to probe which neural process directly correspond to the NCC. This evidence suggests that previous results may have indeed missed the NCC and reported pre-NCC/post-NCCs. Finally, we will discuss how this new taxonomy relates to prevalent theories of consciousness, arguing that some theories might be about post-NCCs instead of NCC.

Distilling the Neural Correlates of Consciousness
Lucia Melloni (Dep’t of Neurophysiology, MPI Frankfurt/Columbia University)

Using MEG to track conscious access and its non-conscious consequences
Stanislas Dehaene, Lucie Charles (Inserm-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Paris, FR)

Isolating NCCs that are necessary and sufficient for visual awareness
Michael Pitts (Dep’t of Psychology, Reed College)

Core vs. Total NCC
Ned Block (Dep’t of Philosophy, New York University)