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Frequency-tagging reveals distinct pattern for subjective visibility and metacognition.

par Mazancieux, Audrey ;Cleeremans, Axel ;De Heering, Adélaïde
Référence Annual meeting of the association of the scientific study of consciousness (2025-07-07: Crête, Grèce)
Publication Non publié, 2025-07-07

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

Inferences about the neural bases of subjective experience often rely on reports that participants express whilst performing a task. However, different studies suggest that reports bias such inferences, contaminating the neural correlates of consciousness. More recently, no-report paradigms have been developed but the involvement of attention in such tasks remains unknown. Here, 32 adults were presented with 60 EEG frequency-tagging sequences composed of various images presented at 6 Hz and all degraded to a supraliminal contrast. In these sequences, male or female faces were also tagged at the specific frequency of 1.2 Hz. Concurrently, participants were asked to detect the color change of a fixation cross on the images to monitor their attention. At the end of each sequence, participants were instructed to estimate the subjective visibility of the faces (using the Perceptual Awareness Scale - PAS), to categorise their gender (measure of objective visibility), and to assess their confidence in this categorisation (measure of metacognition). Mixed-effect models revealed that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the face frequency increased linearly with PAS and confidence. Conversely, the SNR at the image frequency reflecting attentional processes only increased with confidence. This was confirmed by the concurrent attentional task where performance only increased with confidence, but not with PAS. Overall, this data shows that frequency-tagging is sensitive to subjective experience in the absence of reports during the sequence presentation. They also suggest that attentional processes are less involved in subjective visibility than in metacognition.