Measurements of brain activity at the moment of an appearance of perceptual consciousness

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From which areas of the brain does a conscious representation of a visual stimulus emerge? This is a controversial issue because some studies reported a leading role of the higher visual areas in conscious perception, whereas others found neural correlates of consciousness in the primary visual areas and in the lateral geniculate nucleus. One reason for this controversy was the difficulty in isolating neural activity at the moment when a conscious percept emerges in the brain, excluding any bottom-up responses induced by stimuli. In this research program, we investigated this issue with a new approach that combined a new technique of psychology with a measurement of brain activity with a high temporal resolution. Our results revealed that the first neural activity related to perceptual consciousness emerges from the higher visual areas rather than the lower visual areas.