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Updated: Jul 5, 2025

Detecting Pre-Stimulus Source-Level Effects on Object Perception with Magnetoencephalography
Published on: July 26, 2019
The involvement of the human prefrontal cortex in the emergence of visual awareness
Zepeng Fang1, Yuanyuan Dang2, Zhipei Ling2
1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Division of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Abstract:
Exploring the neural mechanisms of awareness is a fundamental task of cognitive neuroscience. There is an ongoing dispute regarding the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the emergence of awareness, which is partially raised by the confound between report- and awareness-related activity. To address this problem, we designed a visual awareness task that can minimize report-related motor confounding. Our results show that saccadic latency is significantly shorter in the aware trials than in the unaware trials. Local field potential (LFP) data from six patients consistently show early (200-300ms) awareness-related activity in the PFC, including event-related potential and high-gamma activity. Moreover, the awareness state can be reliably decoded by the neural activity in the PFC since the early stage, and the neural pattern is dynamically changed rather than being stable during the representation of awareness. Furthermore, the enhancement of dynamic functional connectivity, through the phase modulation at low frequency, between the PFC and other brain regions in the early stage of the awareness trials may explain the mechanism of conscious access. These results indicate that the PFC is critically involved in the emergence of awareness.
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