Long-timescale dynamics shape visual conscious awareness
- 1Ruhr University Bochum
Abstract
Consciousness is mostly studied as if it were composed of independent snapshots, aggregating reports over trials and experimental contexts, disregarding any temporal aspect. However, almost nothing is known about how conscious experience spontaneously fluctuates in time. To shed light on the temporal dynamics of conscious awareness, we evaluated the temporal autocorrelation of subjective visibility/confidence reports and objective performance across 20 datasets (N= 335). Two widely used measures of consciousness dissociate in temporal autocorrelation under full spatial attention: subjective measures followed an exponential decay function with long timescales (> 5s), whereas objective accuracy exhibited a slow linear decay function. But both measures share a common underlying temporal fluctuation dynamics, suggesting that the strong autocorrelation in subjective measures cannot be fully attributed to response bias or criterion shift, but might reflect a genuinely aperiodic fluctuation of conscious awareness. Causal transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) suggests that this temporal dependency of subjective measures is read out in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), where a similarly long neural timescale has been demonstrated. Together, these findings establish a temporal constraint for neural models of conscious access: candidate mechanisms should explain not only whether a stimulus becomes consciously accessible, but also how the probability of conscious access evolves over time.
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BibTeX
@misc{zheng2026longtimescale,
title = {{Long-timescale dynamics shape visual conscious awareness}},
author = {Z. Zheng and D. Truebutschek and Y. Cai and L. Melloni},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.03.748970},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.03.748970v1},
note = {CC BY-NC},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Long-timescale dynamics shape visual conscious awareness
AU - Z. Zheng
AU - D. Truebutschek
AU - Y. Cai
AU - L. Melloni
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/03
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.03.748970
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.03.748970v1
AB - Consciousness is mostly studied as if it were composed of independent snapshots, aggregating reports over trials and experimental contexts, disregarding any temporal aspect. However, almost nothing is known about how conscious experience spontaneously fluctuates in time. To shed light on the temporal dynamics of conscious awareness, we evaluated the temporal autocorrelation of subjective visibility/confidence reports and objective performance across 20 datasets (N= 335). Two widely used measures of consciousness dissociate in temporal autocorrelation under full spatial attention: subjective measures followed an exponential decay function with long timescales (> 5s), whereas objective accuracy exhibited a slow linear decay function. But both measures share a common underlying temporal fluctuation dynamics, suggesting that the strong autocorrelation in subjective measures cannot be fully attributed to response bias or criterion shift, but might reflect a genuinely aperiodic fluctuation of conscious awareness. Causal transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) suggests that this temporal dependency of subjective measures is read out in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), where a similarly long neural timescale has been demonstrated. Together, these findings establish a temporal constraint for neural models of conscious access: candidate mechanisms should explain not only whether a stimulus becomes consciously accessible, but also how the probability of conscious access evolves over time.
ER -