What Shapes Conscious Perception? From Neural Rhythms to Blindsight

Speaker: Yuranny Cabral-Calderin, Freie Universität Berlin
Series: Zangwill Club

Conscious perception is not a fixed readout of sensory input. The same weak stimulus may be detected on one occasion and missed on another, and perception can persist even when a major sensory pathway is damaged. In this talk, I will examine these two situations to ask what shapes whether sensory information reaches awareness.

I will first present work on near-threshold auditory perception showing that detection varies with ongoing neural phase and alpha activity. Using transcranial alternating current stimulation, I will then ask to what extent these dynamics can be causally modulated, and where the influence of endogenous and externally imposed rhythms reaches its limits.

I will next turn to visual perception in patients with lesions involving primary visual cortex. Combining behaviour, physiology, and intracranial recordings, we examine residual visual processing and neural activity that distinguishes seen from unseen stimuli.

Together, these studies highlight both the value and the limits of neural and physiological signatures of conscious perception, and motivate a broader question: how far can findings established in one sensory system, task, or neural architecture be expected to generalize?

Host: Prof Nicky Clayton

This talk may be recorded and uploaded to the Zangwill Club Youtube channel in due course.