Perception, attention, and consciousness

Since the earliest days of psycho-physiology, there has been a debate about the link among sensation, perception, attention, and consciousness. The main question is: What happens to a sensory signal in the brain when it reaches a conscious stage of processing as opposed to being processed preattentively and outside of awareness? Answering this question is a complex challenge and involves combining expertise from several fields of research.

This combination includes investigations of sensory processing in animals and humans and their modulation by various attentional manipulations (spatial, feature-based, object-based, crossmodal) as well as by various manipulations of visibility (e.g., masking, rapid serial visual presentation, rivalry). A major goal of this research is to understand how the large-scale organization influences whether a stimulus reaches consciousness or not. To pursue this goal, neuroimaging techniques (electroencephalography [EEG], magnetoencephalography [MEG], functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]) will be used in combination with innovative computational methods (modeling, machine learning, dynamic causal modeling [DCM]).

Special Newsletter issue on consciousness research: view or download pdf

This page last updated on: 06 November 2026

What if we could read people’s minds?
Is it possible to predict what a person is thinking of – or even what they are planning to do – based alone on their current brain activity? This project investigates ways to decode and predict a person’s thoughts from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. The key is that each thought is associated with a unique brain activation pattern that can be used as a signature or for that specific thought. If we train a classifier to recognize these characteristic signatures we probably can read out a person’s thoughts from their brain activity alone.