Visual awareness and voluntary control

Voluntary motor commands reveal awareness and control of involuntary movement.

The capacity to inhibit actions is central to voluntary motor control. However, the control mechanisms and subjective experience involved in voluntarily stopping an involuntary movement remain poorly understood. Here we examined, in humans, the voluntary inhibition of the Kohnstamm phenomenon, in which sustained voluntary contraction of shoulder abductors is followed by involuntary arm raising....

Visual awareness and the cerebellum: possible role of decorrelation control.

The two roles in awareness most often suggested for the cerebellum are (i) keeping the details of motor skills away from forebrain computation, and (ii) signaling to the forebrain when a sensory event is not predictable from prior motor commands. However, it is unclear how current models of the cerebellum could carry out these roles. Their architecture, based on the seminal ideas of Marr and Al...

Visual attention: Spotlights, highlights and visual awareness

The phenomenon of visual attention has long fascinated scientists interested in higher functions of the brain. Introspection suggests that attention exerts a powerful influence on the flow of visual information within our brains: everyone is familiar with the experience of attending so intently to a particular object in the visual world that he/she is oblivious to other salient stimuli present ...

3 . Visual Attention and Visual Awareness

Primary visual cortex and visual awareness.

The primary visual cortex (V1) is probably the best characterized area of primate cortex, but whether this region contributes directly to conscious visual experience is controversial. Early neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies found that visual awareness was best correlated with neural activity in extrastriate visual areas, but recent studies have found similarly powerful effects in V1. ...