Task requirements affect the neural correlates of consciousness

• Published in: The European journal of neuroscience Vol. 56; no. 10; pp. 5810 - 5822
• Main Authors: Andersen, Lau M., Vinding, Mikkel C., Sandberg, Kristian, Overgaard, Morten
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: France Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.11.2022; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: Awareness; Cognition; Cognitive Neuroscience; Consciousness; Magnetoencephalography; Medicin och hälsovetenskap; Perception; Research Report; vision; Visual Perception; vision; consciousness; magnetoencephalography; perception
• ISSN: 0953-816X; 1460-9568; 1460-9568
• DOI: 10.1111/ejn.15820

In the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, it is often assumed that there is a stable set within the relevant sensory modality. Within the visual modality, the debate has centred upon whether frontal or occipital activations are the best predictors of perceptual awareness. Although not accepted by all as definitive evidence, no‐report and decoding studies have indicated that occipital activity is the most consistently correlated with perceptual awareness whereas frontal activity might be closely related to aspects of cognition typically related to reports. However, perception is rarely just passive perception of something, but more or less always perception for something. That is, the task at hand for the perceiver may influence what is being perceived. This suggests an alternative view: that consciousness is not one specific ‘function’ that can be localized consistently to one area or event‐related component and that the specific attributes of the neural correlates of consciousness depend on the task at hand. To investigate whether and how tasks may influence the neural correlates of consciousness, we here contrasted two tasks, a perceptual task and a conceptual task, using identical stimuli in both tasks. Using magnetoencephalography, we found that the perceptual task recruited more occipital resources than the conceptual task. Furthermore, we found that between the two conditions, the amount of frontal resources recruited differed between different gradations of perceptual awareness partly in an unexpected manner. These findings support a view of task affecting the neural correlates of consciousness. We here show that the neural correlates of consciousness cannot be disentangled from the task that humans are engaged in. We specifically show an interaction where the neural correlates of consciousness in frontal and occipital areas are affected differently depending on whether participants have to engage with the perceptual or the conceptual attributes of identical stimuli. These results indicate that to understand perceptual consciousness of individuals, one also has to understand the action and the aim of the task that individual is engaged in.