Modelling conscious perception by manipulating awareness, attention and expectation

Consciousness is one of the great remaining mysteries of modern science. To investigate consciousness, we can examine the differences between when individuals are aware versus unaware of stimuli by manipulating awareness, attention and expectations. In this thesis, I use these techniques to show: (1) that invisible changes activate only feedforward neural pathways, while visible changes require feedforward and feedback activity, (2) that the activity patterns towards the prefrontal regions contain information about the current contents of awareness, and (3) that individuals are able judge the similarity of their experiences of faces by gender even without paying attention to the faces.