An Active Role of Inferior Frontal Cortex in Conscious Experience

Where is the ghost in the shell?

The role of prefrontal cortex in conscious experience

Veith Weilnhammer and The Visual Perception Lab

Thomas Nagel (1975):

“(…) an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism.”

Subjectivity

How does subjective experience occur at all?

Neural Mechanisms

What are the neural events that generate conscious experience?

Scale

What is the scale at which conscious experience emerges from biological activity?

Function

What is the evolutionary function of conscious experience?

Detection

How can we detect conscious experience outside of the human mind?

5 problems

Mechanisms

Sensory Inputs

Executive Function

Attention

Experimental Dissociation

Sensory Ambiguity

Bistable Perception

Predictive Coding

Model-based fMRI

Prediction errors are encoded in IFC and V5/hMT+.

Model-based fMRI

Prediction errors are encoded in IFC and V5/hMT+.

Model-based fMRI

Prediction errors are fed forward from V5/hMT+ to IFC.

Model-based fMRI

Perceptual content can be decoded from V5/hMT+.

Model-based fMRI

Prediction errors are generated in suppressed V5/hMT+ voxels.

Feedforward Processing

Suppressed voxels in V5/hMT+ encode perceptual conflict.
IFC receives feedforward information about perceptual conflict.

Feedback processing

Is the prefrontal representation of perceptual conflict relevant for conscious experience?
Causal intervention: theta-burst stimulation in IFC and vertex

TMS

Hybrid model

IFC detects and resolves perceptual conflict during bistable perception.

Summary

Resolving Uncertainty

Model simulation

Neural representations

Outlook

Computational Psychiatry

Thanks!

Thanks a lot for your attention!

Bibilography

Weilnhammer, Fritsch, Chikermane, Eckert, Kathak, Stuke, Sterzer. An Active Role of Inferior Frontal Cortex in Conscious Experience. Current Biology 2021.

Weilnhammer, Stuke, Eckert, Standvoß, Sterzer. Humans and mice fluctuate between external and internal modes of sensory processing. bioRxiv 2021.

Weilnhammer, Chikermane, Sterzer. Bistable Perception Alternates between Internal and External Modes of Sensory Processing. iScience 2021.

Weilnhammer, Lukas, Eckert, Stuke, Heinz, Sterzer. Psychotic Experiences in Schizophrenia and Sensitivity to Sensory Evidence. Schizophrenia Bulletin 2020.