Pub Date : 2025-10-23DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103946
Burak Yildirim , Aysu Mutlutürk
This study examines how visual and verbal working memory contributes to episodic future thinking and whether their effects vary across temporal directions while controlling the effects of working memory capacity. Using a dual-task paradigm, participants recalled past and imagined future events under single- and dual-task conditions while performing visual or verbal 2-back tasks. Results showed that episodic future thinking requires more cognitive resources than episodic memory, evidenced by longer response times and reduced phenomenological richness. Performance under visual and verbal working memory loads was similar, indicating that overall working memory capacity contributes to episodic future thinking. However, past events were rated as less important and emotionally intense under a verbal working memory load, suggesting a crucial role for verbal working memory in episodic recall. These findings reveal the modality-specific and capacity-driven mechanisms shaping mental time travel, emphasizing the role of working memory in the representations of past and future events.
{"title":"The role of visual and verbal working memory in remembering the past and imagining the future","authors":"Burak Yildirim , Aysu Mutlutürk","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103946","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103946","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study examines how visual and verbal working memory contributes to episodic future thinking and whether their effects vary across temporal directions while controlling the effects of working memory capacity. Using a dual-task paradigm, participants recalled past and imagined future events under single- and dual-task conditions while performing visual or verbal 2-back tasks. Results showed that episodic future thinking requires more cognitive resources than episodic memory, evidenced by longer response times and reduced phenomenological richness. Performance under visual and verbal working memory loads was similar, indicating that overall working memory capacity contributes to episodic future thinking. However, past events were rated as less important and emotionally intense under a verbal working memory load, suggesting a crucial role for verbal working memory in episodic recall. These findings reveal the modality-specific and capacity-driven mechanisms shaping mental time travel, emphasizing the role of working memory in the representations of past and future events.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103946"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145364822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-22DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103941
Inés Abalo-Rodríguez , Ana P. Pinheiro
Hallucination research is a fast‑growing, inherently interdisciplinary field bridging psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article maps out key conceptual and methodological issues underlying the study of hallucinations. We begin by unpacking core theoretical issues – how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations, whether they form a single construct or several, and how these distinctions influence study design and interpretation. Next, we review the most commonly used experimental paradigms. A clear distinction is drawn between tasks that measure enduring hallucinatory tendencies and those that capture hallucinations in real time. We also review the most widely used rating instruments – including confidence scales – and discuss the phenomenological approach, which foregrounds participants’ first‑person experience. The final section offers a concise, though not exhaustive, checklist of variables researchers must account for – ranging from sensory modality and context to cognitive style, affective state, and cultural background. Taken together, the article serves as an entry‑level guide, posing critical questions that every researcher should answer before designing a study on hallucinations.
{"title":"The Hitchhiker’s guide to hallucination research","authors":"Inés Abalo-Rodríguez , Ana P. Pinheiro","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103941","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103941","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Hallucination research is a fast‑growing, inherently interdisciplinary field bridging psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article maps out key conceptual and methodological issues underlying the study of hallucinations. We begin by unpacking core theoretical issues – how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations, whether they form a single construct or several, and how these distinctions influence study design and interpretation. Next, we review the most commonly used experimental paradigms. A clear distinction is drawn between tasks that measure enduring hallucinatory tendencies and those that capture hallucinations in real time. We also review the most widely used rating instruments – including confidence scales – and discuss the phenomenological approach, which foregrounds participants’ first‑person experience. The final section offers a concise, though not exhaustive, checklist of variables researchers must account for – ranging from sensory modality and context to cognitive style, affective state, and cultural background. Taken together, the article serves as an entry‑level guide, posing critical questions that every researcher should answer before designing a study on hallucinations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103941"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145364829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Brightness perception can diverge sharply from physical luminance due to contextual cues, but whether such illusory brightness is registered without awareness and whether it speeds entry into awareness remain open questions. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to test the glare illusion, which increases perceived brightness without changing central luminance. In Experiment 1, we measured breakthrough time (BT) and found no advantage for glare over physically identical controls, indicating that subjective brightness alone does not reliably hasten access to awareness. In Experiment 2, we selectively suppressed the illusion’s inducer gradients while leaving the central region visible; here the glare condition showed shorter BTs, suggesting that contextual structure can facilitate detection under suppression. In Experiment 3, participants discriminated both physically brighter stimuli and illusory brightness above chance while the stimuli remained suppressed, demonstrating unconscious processing of brightness information. Together, these findings dissociate unconscious encoding from access to awareness: illusory brightness can be processed without consciousness, yet it does not uniformly accelerate emergence into awareness unless the relevant contextual cues are available to the visual system.
{"title":"Illusory brightness under unconscious processing: Evidence from continuous flash suppression","authors":"Hirotaka Senda, Michael Makoto Martinsen, Hideki Tamura, Shigeki Nakauchi, Tetsuto Minami","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103943","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103943","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Brightness perception can diverge sharply from physical luminance due to contextual cues, but whether such illusory brightness is registered without awareness and whether it speeds entry into awareness remain open questions. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to test the glare illusion, which increases perceived brightness without changing central luminance. In Experiment 1, we measured breakthrough time (BT) and found no advantage for glare over physically identical controls, indicating that subjective brightness alone does not reliably hasten access to awareness. In Experiment 2, we selectively suppressed the illusion’s inducer gradients while leaving the central region visible; here the glare condition showed shorter BTs, suggesting that contextual structure can facilitate detection under suppression. In Experiment 3, participants discriminated both physically brighter stimuli and illusory brightness above chance while the stimuli remained suppressed, demonstrating unconscious processing of brightness information. Together, these findings dissociate unconscious encoding from access to awareness: illusory brightness can be processed without consciousness, yet it does not uniformly accelerate emergence into awareness unless the relevant contextual cues are available to the visual system.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103943"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145349755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-17DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103939
Nicola Vasta , Francesco N. Biondi
Navigating crowded urban environments can significantly deplete attentional resources over time, making individuals less attentive and more prone to distractions. While previous research suggests that natural settings can help replenish attentional resources depleted by urban life, little is known about whether similar benefits may arise from tranquil artistic settings, like museums and art exhibitions. Here, we drew on the Attention Restoration Theory to test the restorative effects of a museum visit compared to a walk in an urban environment, using a within-subject pre-post design and a combination of self-reported, behavioral, and physiological measures. Participants completed two computer tasks assessing working memory and attentional control and filled out questionnaires assessing perceived restoration, emotions and stress before and after either a museum visit or an urban walk. Physiological activity was monitored by measuring blink rate and pupil size via an eye-tracker. Results showed greater improvement in attentional control abilities following the museum visit. Additionally, self-reported measures indicated that the museum visit was perceived as being more restorative than the urban walk. Similar improvements were observed for working memory, stress and emotions after both a museum visit and an urban walk. These findings suggest that immersion in artistic environments, like museums, can enhance key attention abilities more effectively than an urban walk, enabling individuals to replenish attention resources and become less distractible afterwards. Our results are encouraging in promoting the beneficial effects of museum visits on attention restoration.
{"title":"Art Immersion: Evidence for attention restoration in museums","authors":"Nicola Vasta , Francesco N. Biondi","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103939","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103939","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Navigating crowded urban environments can significantly deplete attentional resources over time, making individuals less attentive and more prone to distractions. While previous research suggests that natural settings can help replenish attentional resources depleted by urban life, little is known about whether similar benefits may arise from tranquil artistic settings, like museums and art exhibitions. Here, we drew on the Attention Restoration Theory to test the restorative effects of a museum visit compared to a walk in an urban environment, using a within-subject pre-post design and a combination of self-reported, behavioral, and physiological measures. Participants completed two computer tasks assessing working memory and attentional control and filled out questionnaires assessing perceived restoration, emotions and stress before and after either a museum visit or an urban walk. Physiological activity was monitored by measuring blink rate and pupil size via an eye-tracker. Results showed greater improvement in attentional control abilities following the museum visit. Additionally, self-reported measures indicated that the museum visit was perceived as being more restorative than the urban walk. Similar improvements were observed for working memory, stress and emotions after both a museum visit and an urban walk. These findings suggest that immersion in artistic environments, like museums, can enhance key attention abilities more effectively than an urban walk, enabling individuals to replenish attention resources and become less distractible afterwards. Our results are encouraging in promoting the beneficial effects of museum visits on attention restoration.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103939"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145318733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-15DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103944
Anıl Şafak Kaçar , Fuat Balcı
Metacognition is one of the cognitive functions that is shown to be altered in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Studies focusing on metacognitive efficiency have demonstrated disrupted precision of confidence estimates in OCD. However, the data of those studies may have been contaminated by the overestimation of metacognitive efficiency resulting from the use of the staircase method. We used a two-alternative forced-choice task in which difficulty was held constant within each block but varied across blocks throughout the task. No feedback was given to the participants. We collected data from 161 healthy university students with varying degrees of tendencies of OCD symptoms. Contrary to the previous literature, participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had higher metacognitive efficiency. Applying the drift–diffusion modeling approach to the first-order decisions of participants revealed that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had lower efficiency in integrating perceptual information and less cautious thresholds. Finally, we investigated post-error slowing and found that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency exhibited limited adaptation of responses to errors and low confidence levels. Overall, our results suggest that having a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency is associated with sufficient metacognitive capacity but also with limited utilization of the metacognitive information for behavioral adaptation.
{"title":"Perceptual decision making and metacognition in relation to obsessive-compulsive traits","authors":"Anıl Şafak Kaçar , Fuat Balcı","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103944","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103944","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Metacognition is one of the cognitive functions that is shown to be altered in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Studies focusing on metacognitive efficiency have demonstrated disrupted precision of confidence estimates in OCD. However, the data of those studies may have been contaminated by the overestimation of metacognitive efficiency resulting from the use of the staircase method. We used a two-alternative forced-choice task in which difficulty was held constant within each block but varied across blocks throughout the task. No feedback was given to the participants. We collected data from 161 healthy university students with varying degrees of tendencies of OCD symptoms. Contrary to the previous literature, participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had higher metacognitive efficiency. Applying the drift–diffusion modeling approach to the first-order decisions of participants revealed that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had lower efficiency in integrating perceptual information and less cautious thresholds. Finally, we investigated post-error slowing and found that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency exhibited limited adaptation of responses to errors and low confidence levels. Overall, our results suggest that having a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency is associated with sufficient metacognitive capacity but also with limited utilization of the metacognitive information for behavioral adaptation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103944"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145309963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-11DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103942
Herrick Fung , Medha Shekhar , Kai Xue , Manuel Rausch , Dobromir Rahnev
Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies have typically included just one or at most two manipulations, leaving it unclear whether each manipulation has a unique effect on accuracy vs. confidence. Subjects indicated whether a tilted Gabor patch was oriented clockwise or counterclockwise from 45°. We included manipulations of the task-defining feature (tilt offset) and four auxiliary, non-task-defining features (size, duration, spatial frequency, and noise level). We found that the four auxiliary manipulations had fairly similar effects on accuracy and confidence. In contrast, the task-defining tilt offset manipulation stood out by affecting accuracy more strongly than confidence. In addition, tilt offset exhibited a supraadditive interaction with all other manipulations for both accuracy and confidence, whereas all auxiliary manipulations exhibited either no interactions or subadditive interactions with each other. Furthermore, tilt offset was the only manipulation for which confidence in incorrect trials decreased with increasing difficulty, while all auxiliary manipulations exhibited the opposite trend. Overall, our results reveal a noticeable similarity among the effects of all four auxiliary (non-task-defining) manipulations on accuracy and confidence, as well as a prominent difference between them and the task-defining manipulation (tilt offset). These results enable a priori predictions of how novel manipulations would affect accuracy and confidence.
{"title":"Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence","authors":"Herrick Fung , Medha Shekhar , Kai Xue , Manuel Rausch , Dobromir Rahnev","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103942","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103942","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies have typically included just one or at most two manipulations, leaving it unclear whether each manipulation has a unique effect on accuracy vs. confidence. Subjects indicated whether a tilted Gabor patch was oriented clockwise or counterclockwise from 45°. We included manipulations of the task-defining feature (tilt offset) and four auxiliary, non-task-defining features (size, duration, spatial frequency, and noise level). We found that the four auxiliary manipulations had fairly similar effects on accuracy and confidence. In contrast, the task-defining tilt offset manipulation stood out by affecting accuracy more strongly than confidence. In addition, tilt offset exhibited a supraadditive interaction with all other manipulations for both accuracy and confidence, whereas all auxiliary manipulations exhibited either no interactions or subadditive interactions with each other. Furthermore, tilt offset was the only manipulation for which confidence in incorrect trials decreased with increasing difficulty, while all auxiliary manipulations exhibited the opposite trend. Overall, our results reveal a noticeable similarity among the effects of all four auxiliary (non-task-defining) manipulations on accuracy and confidence, as well as a prominent difference between them and the task-defining manipulation (tilt offset). These results enable a priori predictions of how novel manipulations would affect accuracy and confidence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103942"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145271327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-11DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103940
V. Baaba Dadzie, James Danckert
Prior work shows that highly boredom prone individuals report feeling diminished levels of agency. The current study investigated the possibility that the highly boredom prone would be more sensitive (and less tolerant) to disruptions to their own agency. Participants played the video game Pong, with delays gradually introduced between their initiation of movements of the paddle and actual movements on the screen as a means of disrupting agency. In addition, participants had the option to reset the game (which also reset delays to zero) as often as they liked. State boredom ratings were negatively associated with subjective ratings of control, a proxy for agency, during game play. Frustration ratings were shown to mediate the association between state boredom and control ratings. For participants who made a minimum of two resets during game play, boredom proneness was predictive of the total number of resets, such that those higher in boredom proneness tended to reset the game more frequently. Further work is needed to determine how the relation between boredom and agency might influence the failure to launch into action that is characteristic of boredom proneness.
{"title":"Agency, frustration, and the experience of boredom","authors":"V. Baaba Dadzie, James Danckert","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103940","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103940","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prior work shows that highly boredom prone individuals report feeling diminished levels of agency. The current study investigated the possibility that the highly boredom prone would be more sensitive (and less tolerant) to disruptions to their own agency. Participants played the video game Pong, with delays gradually introduced between their initiation of movements of the paddle and actual movements on the screen as a means of disrupting agency. In addition, participants had the option to reset the game (which also reset delays to zero) as often as they liked. State boredom ratings were negatively associated with subjective ratings of control, a proxy for agency, during game play. Frustration ratings were shown to mediate the association between state boredom and control ratings. For participants who made a minimum of two resets during game play, boredom proneness was predictive of the total number of resets, such that those higher in boredom proneness tended to reset the game more frequently. Further work is needed to determine how the relation between boredom and agency might influence the failure to launch into action that is characteristic of boredom proneness.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103940"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145271326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-01DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103938
Maren Giersiepen , Nils Wendel Heinrich , Annika Österdiekhoff , Stefan Kopp , Nele Russwinkel , Simone Schütz-Bosbach , Jakob Kaiser
Sense of control (SoC) over our actions is crucial for regulating our behavior. SoC arises from low-level processes, such as immediate sensory feedback, and high-level processes, such as performance evaluation. Studies using simple action-effect tasks suggest that people rely more on low-level sensory than on high-level cues of control. Yet, it remains unclear how these cues interact to shape the SoC in complex, goal-directed environments that require continuous behavioral adaptation. To investigate this, 50 participants performed a challenging motor control task akin to a video game, steering a spaceship along a continuously changing path. Sensorimotor control was manipulated by varying task difficulty via input noise across experimental blocks. After each trial, participants received negative, neutral, or positive feedback, followed by rating of their SoC. Linear mixed model analyses revealed that both sensory and evaluative feedback influenced the SoC. SoC decreased with increasing task difficulty. Furthermore, independent of difficulty, negative feedback reduced the SoC whereas positive feedback enhanced it, with a stronger effect for negative feedback. Notably, the effects of task difficulty and negative feedback were influenced by participants’ depressive symptoms and their external locus of control, suggesting that generalized control beliefs modulate task-specific control experience. These findings indicate that SoC is informed by both low-level sensorimotor cues and high-level affective feedback, suggesting an integration of multiple types of information to assess control in dynamic task contexts where action-effect contingencies are extended over time. Crucially, these effects depend on trait-like control beliefs, highlighting the need to account for individual differences when investigating situated control experience.
{"title":"Am I in control? The dynamics of sensory information, performance feedback, and personality in shaping the sense of control","authors":"Maren Giersiepen , Nils Wendel Heinrich , Annika Österdiekhoff , Stefan Kopp , Nele Russwinkel , Simone Schütz-Bosbach , Jakob Kaiser","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103938","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103938","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Sense of control (SoC) over our actions is crucial for regulating our behavior. SoC arises from low-level processes, such as immediate sensory feedback, and high-level processes, such as performance evaluation. Studies using simple action-effect tasks suggest that people rely more on low-level sensory than on high-level cues of control. Yet, it remains unclear how these cues interact to shape the SoC in complex, goal-directed environments that require continuous behavioral adaptation. To investigate this, 50 participants performed a challenging motor control task akin to a video game, steering a spaceship along a continuously changing path. Sensorimotor control was manipulated by varying task difficulty via input noise across experimental blocks. After each trial, participants received negative, neutral, or positive feedback, followed by rating of their SoC. Linear mixed model analyses revealed that both sensory and evaluative feedback influenced the SoC. SoC decreased with increasing task difficulty. Furthermore, independent of difficulty, negative feedback reduced the SoC whereas positive feedback enhanced it, with a stronger effect for negative feedback. Notably, the effects of task difficulty and negative feedback were influenced by participants’ depressive symptoms and their external locus of control, suggesting that generalized control beliefs modulate task-specific control experience. These findings indicate that SoC is informed by both low-level sensorimotor cues and high-level affective feedback, suggesting an integration of multiple types of information to assess control in dynamic task contexts where action-effect contingencies are extended over time. Crucially, these effects depend on trait-like control beliefs, highlighting the need to account for individual differences when investigating situated control experience.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"135 ","pages":"Article 103938"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145253680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-01DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103935
Jona Förster , Giovanni Vardiero , Till Nierhaus , Felix Blankenburg
EEG studies have identified ERP components at various latencies as predictors of conscious somatosensory perception, but it remains largely unclear which factors are responsible for this variation. Here, for the first time we directly compare the event-related potential correlates of stimulus detection under tactile versus electrical peri-threshold stimulation using single-trial modelling and Bayesian model selection within and between groups, while controlling for task-relevance and post-perceptual processes with a visual-somatosensory matching task. We find evidence that the P50 component predicts conscious perception under tactile, but not electrical stimulation: while electrical stimulation evokes a P50 already for subliminal stimuli and activity in this time window is best explained by stimulus intensity, there is almost no subliminal P50 for tactile stimulation, and detection best explains the data. In contrast, the N80 and N140 components correlate with detection and detection probability in both stimulation groups. The P100 and the P300 were modulated by detection in the tactile group, and by detection probability in the electrical group. Our results indicate that cortical processing in somatosensory target detection partly depends on the type of stimulation used. We propose that electrical stimulation of afferent nerve fibers that do not give rise to conscious perception may mask the P50 modulation associated with conscious somatosensory detection, and might contribute to subliminal evoked cortical responses.
{"title":"ERP responses reveal different neural mechanisms for perception of electrical and tactile stimuli","authors":"Jona Förster , Giovanni Vardiero , Till Nierhaus , Felix Blankenburg","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103935","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103935","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>EEG studies have identified ERP components at various latencies as predictors of conscious somatosensory perception, but it remains largely unclear which factors are responsible for this variation. Here, for the first time we directly compare the event-related potential correlates of stimulus detection under tactile versus electrical <em>peri</em>-threshold stimulation using single-trial modelling and Bayesian model selection within and between groups, while controlling for task-relevance and post-perceptual processes with a visual-somatosensory matching task. We find evidence that the P50 component predicts conscious perception under tactile, but not electrical stimulation: while electrical stimulation evokes a P50 already for subliminal stimuli and activity in this time window is best explained by stimulus intensity, there is almost no subliminal P50 for tactile stimulation, and detection best explains the data. In contrast, the N80 and N140 components correlate with detection and detection probability in both stimulation groups. The P100 and the P300 were modulated by detection in the tactile group, and by detection probability in the electrical group. Our results indicate that cortical processing in somatosensory target detection partly depends on the type of stimulation used. We propose that electrical stimulation of afferent nerve fibers that do not give rise to conscious perception may mask the P50 modulation associated with conscious somatosensory detection, and might contribute to subliminal evoked cortical responses.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"135 ","pages":"Article 103935"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145187321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-10-01DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2025.103937
Jan-Daniel Höhmann , Gerhard Jocham , Lina I. Skora
Habitual behaviour is commonly assumed to operate outside of conscious control, deliberation, or awareness, driven by stimulus–response (S-R) associations rather than goal-directed evaluation. Here, we investigate whether habitual instrumental behaviours can be triggered by stimuli that are prevented from entering subjective awareness with subliminal presentation. In a preregistered within-subjects study (N after exclusions = 75), we examined this question by employing a symmetrical outcome revaluation task. Participants underwent extensive instrumental training, forming strong S-R associations, before completing two testing stages: a conscious stage with fully visible stimuli, and an unconscious stage where stimuli were rendered subliminal via visual masking. In the conscious condition, participants exhibited habitual control, responding more accurately to habit-congruent (still-valuable, still-non-valuable) stimuli than to habit-incongruent (upvalued, devalued) stimuli, replicating prior findings. However, in the unconscious condition participants did not exhibit above-chance accuracy, and responses were not biased toward habitual actions, suggesting that subliminal stimuli were unable to elicit either habitual or goal-directed responses. These findings challenge the notion that habitual control of instrumental behaviour can function independently of stimulus awareness and suggest that conscious access to action-relevant cues may be necessary even for well-established S-R associations to guide behaviour.
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