Honing in on neural correlates of conscious audition (NCCA): Progress and problems.

Dr. Andrew Dykstra, Auditory Cognition Lab, Heidelberg University

How conscious perception emerges from patterns of brain activity is a fundamental question of cognitive neuroscience. While considerable progress has been made, most (all?) prominent theories derive from vision, stemming partially from a relative paucity of data from other modalities. In this talk, I will present (primarily M/EEG) results from studies attempting to uncover putative neural correlates of conscious audition (the NCCA, if you will). The results simultaneously expand and constrain recent notions of the NCC generally, though they actually largely agree with one of the earliest empirical studies of the NCC (from audition, ironically enough). However, several potentially confounding factors (attention and task relevance, for example) remain somewhat unaddressed, hindering straight-forward interpretation and highlighting the need for novel approaches including no-report paradigms, physiological indices, and data-driven analysis methods.  

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