Consciousness and Cognition

Research on mental visual imagery typically relies on vividness ratings. However, vividness is ill-defined as it lacks an objective reference. Here, we present survey results that suggest vividness is nevertheless a robust measure. It explains individual differences of a broad range of subjective experiences, from the detail of mental imagery, the propensity to report having other internally generated visual experiences, and the vividness of visual dreams. Critically, simple vividness ratings can replace the protracted questionnaires commonly used for this purpose and reduce methodological issues with these instruments. We further find that vividness is closely linked with the experience of "seeing" mental images or projecting them into the external world. People who report seeing mental images with their eyes shut are also more likely to experience externally projected imagery. Nevertheless, many people report having mental depictions but without seeing. Overall, our results indicate we should redefine visual aphantasia to distinguish individuals with faint or unseen visual images from those completely lacking a pictorial representation.

Insight is commonly studied in laboratory paradigms as a sudden shift in understanding accompanied by characteristic "Aha!" experiences. However, such paradigms may not capture the full phenomenological range of insight as it occurs in naturalistic contexts. This study examined insight experiences across psychedelic, everyday-life, and laboratory settings to characterise context-related differences in insight phenomenology and identify which dimensions predict perceived belief change. Using a within-subject, cross-sectional design, participants reported insight experiences across four contexts: psychedelic experiences, everyday-life insights, Compound Remote Associates problem-solving, and ambiguous image-based tasks. For each context, participants rated insights across multiple phenomenological dimensions. Ordinal mixed-effects models examined context effects and predictors of belief change. Psychedelic insights were rated higher than everyday insights across most dimensions, particularly intensity, meaning, ineffability, and belief change. In contrast, laboratory-based insights received substantially lower ratings, especially for meaning, belief change, and drive. Naturalistic-laboratory differences were largest for dimensions related to personal significance and transformation, particularly meaning and belief change, whereas core "Aha!" features such as confidence and pleasure showed smaller differences. Across naturalistic contexts, perceived meaning was the strongest predictor of belief change, with additional contributions from intensity and ineffability. After accounting for these phenomenological dimensions, context was not independently associated with belief change. These findings suggest that laboratory paradigms capture core features of insight but underrepresent dimensions related to personal meaning and belief updating. They further indicate that insight-related belief change depends less on context itself than on how the insight is experienced.

The content of consciousness (cC) constitutes an essential part of human life and is at the very heart of the hard problem of consciousness. The cC of a person (e.g., study participant) has been examined indirectly by evaluating the persons behavioral reports, bodily signs, or neural signals. However, the measures do not reflect the full spectrum of the persons cC. In this paper, we define a method, called "CHANging Consciousness Epistemically" (CHANCE), to consciously experience a cC that would be identical to that experienced by another person, and thus directly know the entire spectrum of the others cC. In addition, the ontologically subjective knowledge about a persons cC may be considered epistemically objective and scientific data. The CHANCE method comprises two empirical steps: (1) identifying the minimally sufficient, content-specific neural correlates of consciousness (mscNCC) and (2) reproducing a specific mscNCC in different brains.

Our thoughts often drift away from the tasks at hand. Various factors influence this phenomenon, including changes in the external environment, individual cognitive characteristics, and fluctuations in bodily responses. This study investigated the relationship between autonomic nervous fluctuations and thought state transitions, focusing on individual differences such as cardiac interoception. First, the heartbeat counting task was conducted, and the difference between the reported and actual number of heartbeats was used as an index of interoceptive accuracy. The participants then completed an auditory attention task while their cardiac activities were monitored. During the task, thought probes were randomly presented, and participants selected their thought content from eight categories and rated aspects such as task concentration and arousal. We estimated trial-by-trial thought states in a data-driven manner and examined how the current thought state, autonomic nervous activity, and individual cardiac interoceptive accuracy influenced the thought state in the next trial. The results demonstrated a strong association between higher cardiac interoceptive accuracy and the maintenance of similar states in subsequent trials when accelerated heart rates occurred during self-related thought states. Furthermore, the participants with higher depressive tendencies and interoceptive accuracy exhibited an increased likelihood of transitioning to self-related states when experiencing decreased heart rate during task-concentrated states. These results suggest that accurately detecting heart rate changes associated with specific thought states facilitates updates in first-person conscious experience, thereby biasing the transition patterns of subsequent thought states. This study provides new insights into the cognitive and physiological mechanisms underlying the dynamics of spontaneous thought.

Introduction Auto-Induced Cognitive Trance (AICT) is a non-ordinary state of consciousness (NOSC) that can be accessed by will alone once a standardised self-induction procedure has been learnt. The first research publication on AICT dates back only ten years, meaning that research on this phenomenon is still in its infancy. Previous reports concerning the phenomenology and neurophysiology of AICT revealed similarities with more extensively described NOSCs, as well as unusual features, raising questions about the potential benefits of AICT practice for well-being. Objective This study aimed to gather quantitative descriptive data on features associated with well-being in a large comparative sample of AICT practitioners and non-practitioners. Method This research followed a web-based survey study design which enquired AICT-trained and yet-to-be trained participants to self-report through validated standardised questionnaires on vitality, self-esteem, mental well-being, trait anxiety, life satisfaction, happiness, positive and negative affect, nature-relatedness and connectedness. Data on NOSCs practices, life history events that could have led to spontaneous NOSCs, and demographic data were collected for further inclusion as control variables in statistical models. Results The online questionnaire yielded 607 valid responses, (171 yet-to-be trained participants and 436 AICT-trained participants). AICT practice was found to be associated with increased self-esteem (RSE), overall connectedness (WCS) as well as all subdimensions of connectedness (WCS Self, WCS Others, WCS World). AICT practice Duration exhibited significant effects on global connectedness and all subdimensions of connectedness, self-esteem, trait anxiety (STAIT-5), and positive affect (PANAS+). Conclusions AICT seems to benefit to practitioners well-being shortly after training through increases in self-esteem and in the sense of connectedness. Prolonged AICT practice is associated with added decreased trait anxiety and increased positive affect. Further research is needed to confirm these findings with a sample including AICT-uninterested participants, and to clarify the underlying mechanisms of AICT.

The transformative effects of interpersonal synchrony on reshaping the relationship between the self and the group by fostering self-other blurring are well-documented. However, these findings largely rely on self-reported measures, leaving aspects of the self inaccessible to explicit measures unexplored. We combined the Implicit Association Task (IAT) with conventional explicit evaluations of self-other blurring to examine how experiences of synchronous movement may also swiftly shape implicit measures indicative of self-other blurring. In three online experiments participants experienced synchronous movement as opposed to no movement (Experiment 1) or unpredictable movement (Experiment 2) or asynchronous movement (Experiment 3) with virtually presented agents. Our data indicate that synchronous movement led to higher levels of self-other blurring on the Inclusion of Other in Self (IOS) scale and implicit self-concept evaluations on the IAT. Participants demonstrated a preference for associating self-related words with images of the synchronous group, while associating other-related words with images from the no-movement, unpredictable, and asynchronous movement groups. This suggests that experiencing synchronous movement with a group influences implicit semantic self-associations. These findings suggest that interpersonal synchrony may alter self-concept at both an embodied and semantic level, extending beyond conscious affiliation. Our combined methodology offers a deeper insight into the impact of synchronous experiences on self-constructs and social relationships.

Perfectionism as a personality trait can be seen as having both adaptive and maladaptive dimensions. Nevertheless, their relationships with psychological distress remain mixed in the current literature. Previous studies were also limited by the use of impure measurements and the failure to statistically control for the effects of the other dimension. By addressing these major limitations and exploring the mediating and moderating roles of self-esteem and self-compassion, the current study provides an in-depth examination of the relationships between bidimensional perfectionism and psychological distress. In a community sample of 503 adults, results supported a bidimensional view of perfectionism, with maladaptive perfectionism positively predicting psychological distress and adaptive perfectionism being unrelated to psychological distress. Self-esteem was found to mediate the relationships between both dimensions of perfectionism and psychological distress. Self-compassion was only found to moderate the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and self-esteem. Whilst the maladaptive nature of maladaptive perfectionism was supported in this study, findings suggested that adaptive perfectionism remains a more complicated construct. Future studies should aim at clarifying the nature and psychological outcomes of adaptive perfectionism.

The foreign language effect shows that emotional reactivity is reduced when we use a second language instead of our native one to address different situations. The present study aims to test whether the use of cognitive reappraisal could be influenced by the participants language (native/foreign). For this purpose, a sample of 60 participants with subclinical phobia to cockroaches was exposed to several phobic and neutral pictures while they used cognitive reappraisal in their native or in a foreign language. Physiological measures (pupil dilation and electrodermal activity) and self-reports of affective valence and arousal were collected. Results show an overall effectiveness of the strategy of reappraisal in both languages. Additionally, the use of a foreign language depicts a decrease in the affective negativity of the threat stimuli in terms of valence. The ratings of arousal also show a general higher arousal as an effect of the use of a foreign language. The present results suggest that using a foreign language could be advantageous to reduce negative emotionality by reappraisal. However, it could be a barrier for reappraising non-unpleasant pictures. Further studies should explore the foreign language effect in psychotherapy to open new ways of approaching different disorders.

To some extent, humans can re-experience the sensations of past events and pre-experience the future. These capacities are inter-related. But there are substantial individual differences. At the extremes, small minorities of people report that they either cannot have imagined experiences at all, or that their imagined sensations are as real to them as their actual experiences of the physical world. We wanted to know if such individual differences are uniform across different types of imagined experience (e.g. vision, audio, taste and smell), or if people generally have idiosyncratic patterns of different types (vision, audio, taste and smell) of imagined experiences. We find that people report having idiosyncratic diets of different types of imagined sensation, characterised by differences in salience. One person might have more salient imagined visual than taste experiences, while another reports the reverse. Moreover, these propensities are consistent across peoples attempts to re-experience the past, and to pre-experience the future, and they predict peoples experience and usage of different types of imagined sensation in their everyday lives.

Previous research has shown that the eyes pupils are larger when imaging dark as compared to bright objects or scenes. Based on this, it has been claimed that pupil size is a sensitive marker of mental-imagery vividness. We investigated this claim in three experiments, conducted in two countries (Norway and The Netherlands; Ntotal = 115), in which participants read, listened, or freely imagined stories that evoked a sense of darkness or brightness. In addition, participants rated their imagery vividness after each story, as a measure of moment-to-moment fluctuations in imagery; and their imagery vividness in general, as a measure of individual differences in imagery. Overall, we found that darkness-evoking stories induced larger pupils than brightness-evoking stories, although this effect was highly variable and only statistically reliable for longer (> 1 min) audio stories. Importantly, we consistently found that this pupil-size difference (dark - bright) was largest for vividly imagined stories. Finally, we did not find any relationship between this pupil-size difference and individual differences in general in imagery. We conclude that the strength of pupil-size changes in response to imagined darkness or brightness reflects moment-to-moment fluctuations in imagery vividness within an individual rather than individual differences in imagery vividness as a personal trait.

BackgroundPrior research has shown that belief in conspiracy theories (CTs) is associated with individual narcissism, encompassing both grandiosity and vulnerability. Initial evidence suggests that this link is mediated by mistrust and suspicion towards others, alongside rigid belief systems such as odd beliefs, fatalism, or delusions. ObjectiveWithin the Epistemic Trust (ET) framework, this study examined whether the narcissism-conspiracy link is accounted for by epistemic stances of mistrust and rigidity formed developmentally. MethodsA cross-sectional design was used, with self-report data from 417 UK-based adults from the non-clinical population. Pathological narcissism, assessed via the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI), was modelled as the independent variable, and conspiracy mentality, assessed with the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ), as the dependent variable. Epistemic mistrust (Epistemic Trust, Mistrust, and Credulity Questionnaire; ETMCQ) and epistemic rigidity (Epistemic Vice Scale; EVS) were tested as mediators. Structural equation modelling (SEM) with latent variables was conducted. ResultsSEM indicated that epistemic mistrust and rigidity fully mediated the effect of narcissism on conspiracy mentality, accounting for 20% of the variance. This mediation pattern held for overall narcissism as well as the grandiosity and vulnerability subdimensions. ConclusionsThe influence of subclinical narcissistic traits on conspiracy mentality appears to operate via mistrust and rigidity in epistemic stance. For narcissistic individuals, these may function as defensive strategies to shield their belief systems from external challenge by disengaging from social input. The findings highlight the importance of communication strategies, informed by the ET framework, that promote openness and cognitive flexibility in individuals with heightened narcissism who endorse conspiratorial beliefs.

Negative or threatening stimuli capture attention. However, it remains unclear whether this phenomenon is best conceived as bottom-up (i.e. salience-driven) or top-down (i.e. goal- directed) instead. To address this question, we conducted two experiments using a previously validated dot-probe task (DPT) where physical salience (i.e. abrupt luminance change) and negative emotion (i.e. fearful face) competed with one another for attention selection (Experiment 1, n = 40) or negative (but also positive) emotion could be used as an endogenous cue by the participants to guide this process (Experiment 2, n = 39). Eye-tracking was used to ascertain that both cue and target were processed with peripheral vision. In Experiment 1, we found that negative emotion and physical salience both drove spatial attention in a bottom-up manner, yet their effects were under-additive, suggesting that they could mutually inhibit each other. Moreover, the results of Experiment 2 showed that fear, unlike happiness, could bias spatial attention in a top-down manner, yet only when participants were aware of the association created between the emotional cue and targets location at the block level. Combined together, these novel findings suggest that negative value does not influence the priority map independently from physical salience and goal but depending on the specific combination of cues available for attention selection in the environment, it acts either as an exogenous or endogenous cue, thereby revealing an enhanced flexibility for it.

Pupillary response reflects not only ambient light changes but also top-down factors. Nevertheless, it remains inconclusive whether the conscious awareness modulates the pupillary response. We investigated pupillary responses to faces under different conscious conditions using continuous flash suppression (CFS). In Experiment 1 and 2, we used a breaking-CFS procedure in which participants had to detect the face from suppression. Results showed that the pupil constricted more to upright faces than to inverted faces before the face was detected, suggesting that pupillary responses reflect face processing entering consciousness. In Experiment 3 and 4, we used a fixed duration-CFS procedure with both objective performance and subjective reports. Different pupillary responses were observed only when the participant was aware of the face. These findings imply that the conscious awareness is critical for modulating autonomic neural circuits of the pupillary function. The corresponding pupillary responses may reflect dynamic processes underlying conscious awareness.

Self-favoring beliefs (e.g., that one tends to perform better than peers) are generally associated with positive psychological outcomes like increased self-esteem and resilience. However, this tendency may be problematic in the context of collective action problems, wherein individuals are reliant on others pro-social behaviors to achieve larger goals. We examined this question in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and recruited participants (n = 1023) from a university community in Spring 2020. We found evidence for a self-peer asymmetry, such that participants reported that they were doing more to stop the spread of the disease and were more pro-socially motivated than peers. Actual peer reports indicated that these were overestimations. This self-enhancement tendency comes with a cost: the perceived self-peer asymmetry mediated the relationship between Covid-specific worry and general anxiety during the early lockdown period. This indicates that while believing one is doing more than others may be maladaptive in collective action problems.

When measuring memory performance for emotional and neutral stimuli many studies are confounded by not controlling for differential semantic relatedness between stimulus sets. This could lead to the misattribution of the cause of an emotional enhancement of memory effect (EEM), because differential semantic relatedness also contributes to the EEM. Participants rated static visual emotional and neutral scenes on measures of arousal, valence, and semantic relatedness. These measures were used to create a novel stimulus set, which - in addition to demonstrating significant differences in measures of valence and arousal - also controlled for within-set semantic relatedness; thus resolving a crucial issue that has not previously been addressed in the use of visual emotional stimuli. As an added advantage, the stimulus set developed here are controlled for measures of objective visual complexity, also implicated as confounding to the investigation of memory. This article introduces a collection of emotional and neutral colour images which can be organised flexibly according to experimental requirements. These stimuli are made freely available for non-commercial use within the scientific community.

Light extramission is a popular yet erroneous model of human vision positing that light projects through the eyes over surrounding objects, allowing them to become visible. However, light extramission research has failed to distinguish between light and other types of emissions coming from the eyes, thereby discounting the possibility that extramission mechanisms might hold true for phenomena other than light. Here, we explored the thought extramission model, which is the notion that thoughts emanate from the eyes in the form of visualized representations. We show that the eyes project thoughts a short distance away in the form of high-resolution conceptual maps whose structure collapses at great distances. We also demonstrate that sensory filtering of thought projection by reducing light contrast lowers the resolution of conceptual maps. Our results highlight the supporting role of the visual system for thought processes relying on contrast, luminance, and perspective formation.

In a world overloaded with sensory input, organisms use spatial attention to selectively process the most relevant information. For a highly social species like humans, one influential attentional cue is the direction of other peoples gaze: by perceiving where others look and following their gaze, observers can increase their chances of detecting important information. This well-established phenomenon, called the gaze cueing effect (GCE), is traditionally considered reflexive. However, gaze-shifts do not always indicate external attention; they can also occur for other reasons, such as when attention is shifted inwards during effortful cognitive processing. The ability of observers to interpret the eye movements of other people correctly, while dissociating inwards and outwards attention shifts, is critical for efficient management of their attentional resources. In this study, we examined the role of context on the interpretation of other peoples gaze. Across two preregistered experiments (total N=110), participants viewed gaze-shifts while performing a perceptual task. One group was primed to interpret gaze-shifts as reflecting inward attention deployment during cognitive effort, while the other was not provided with an interpretive context. The results revealed that GCE was reduced when gaze-shifts were perceived as linked to cognitive effort rather than external attention, indicating that attentional responses to gaze cues are context-dependent rather than purely reflexive. These findings highlight the flexibility of social attention, revealing that higher-order cognitive interpretation can override well-established attentional mechanisms. With its interdisciplinary approach, reexamining attentional processes in light of social cognition, this study offers new perspectives on the multifaceted socio-cognitive mind. Significance statementIn a world overflowing with sensory input, our attention is a limited resource which must be allocated efficiently. One way we manage this is by attending to locations where other people look, assuming their gaze points to something important. This study shows this mechanism of attention shift is not automatic. Instead, individuals interpret what the eye movements reflect and modulate their attention shifts accordingly. When observers believed that a person was thinking rather than looking at something meaningful, they were less likely to shift their attention in the same direction. These findings challenge the long-standing idea that humans reflexively follow others gaze and reveal that our attention is guided not just by where people look, but by what we think is happening in their minds. This insight has real-world implications for improving communication, education, and the design of socially aware technologies like virtual assistants or classroom tools.

One of the ongoing debates about visual consciousness is whether it can be considered as an all-or-none or a graded phenomenon. This may depend on the experimental paradigm and the task used to investigate this question. The present event-related potential study (N = 32) focuses on the attentional blink paradigm for which so far only little and mixed evidence is available. Detection of T2 face targets during the attentional blink was assessed via an objective accuracy measure (reporting the faces gender), subjective visibility on a perceptual awareness scale (PAS) as well as event-related potentials time-locked to T2 onset (components P1, N1, N2, and P3). The behavioral results indicate a graded rather than an all-or-none pattern of visual awareness. Corresponding graded differences in the N1, N2, and P3 components were observed for the comparison of visibility levels. These findings suggest that conscious perception during the attentional blink can occur in a graded fashion.

Cognitively demanding tasks are often perceived as costly due to the cognitive control resources they require, leading to effort avoidance, particularly in psychiatric populations with motivational impairments. Research on anxiety and cognitive effort are mixed: some studies suggest anxiety increases the perceived effort cost and avoidance, while others indicate that cognitive effort engagement can serve as an adaptive coping strategy. To reconcile these perspectives, we examined the interaction between state and trait anxiety on cognitive effort evaluation and engagement in two experiments. We hypothesized that state anxiety enhances task engagement as difficulty increases, and that this effect is diminished in individuals with high trait anxiety. Experiment 1 assessed self-reported anxiety in an online sample, while Experiment 2 manipulated state anxiety through autobiographical recall. Both experiments employed flow induction and effort discounting paradigms. Across both studies, the effect of state anxiety on task engagement depended on trait anxiety, but the direction of the state anxiety effect was opposite to the effect we predicted. In Experiment 1, participants with low trait anxiety reported reduced task engagement, as indexed by lower flow scores, when state anxiety was higher, but only in easy tasks. This effect was attenuated in participants with higher trait anxiety. The same pattern was observed in Experiment 2, but this time the interaction between trait and state anxiety was present regardless of task difficulty. These findings suggest that trait anxiety may reflect reduced impact of state anxiety on task disengagement. Public significance statementThis study demonstrated that effects of state anxiety on task disengagement depend on individual differences in trait anxiety. People with higher trait anxiety reported reduced effects of state anxiety on task disengagement.

ObjectivesOur working memory (WM) is susceptible to errors influenced by various sources. Recent research has illuminated the intricate relationship between emotional valence and working memory performance. This study aims to comprehensively investigate memory recall biases across different emotional categories. MethodTo explore this relationship, we designed and implemented a delayed-reproduction facial emotion n-back task. Participants were tasked with recalling the emotional valence of target faces across various n-back conditions, selecting their responses from a continuum of 19 morphed faces ranging from sad to happy. ResultsOur findings indicate that participants generally exhibit a negativity bias, struggling more with happy faces. Interestingly, they also perceive happy faces as less happy and sad faces as less sad, suggesting both positive and negative reappraisal in their emotional valence perception. This underscores the complex interplay between emotional valence and cognitive performance. Notably, recall of neutral images remained stable and was unaffected by preceding emotional contexts. ConclusionThese findings demonstrate that emotional content in working memory significantly impacts errors during WM tasks, with more emotionally charged faces leading to a greater drift toward the lower valence axis. This highlights the need for further exploration of how emotional factors influence cognitive processes in working memory.