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

大脑的哪个区域会产生视觉刺激的有意识表征？这是一个有争议的问题，因为一些研究报告了高级视觉区域在意识知觉中的主导作用，而另一些研究则发现初级视觉区域和外侧膝状核中的意识神经相关。这一争议的一个原因是，很难将意识知觉在大脑中出现时的神经活动分离出来，排除任何由刺激引起的自下而上的反应。在这个研究项目中，我们用一种新的方法来研究这个问题，这种方法结合了一种新的心理学技术和一种具有高时间分辨率的大脑活动测量方法。我们的研究结果表明，与感知意识相关的第一个神经活动出现在较高的视觉区域，而不是较低的视觉区域。

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.