Seeing beyond vision:Understanding how attention and prediction shape conscious visual perception

Abstract

The ability to selectively attend to relevant aspects of our environment and form predictions about our visual surroundings impact how we see the world around us. To shed light on this, combining visual paradigms with neural recordings and machine learning analysis techniques, I examined how perception and conscious report follow from the activity at different stages of visual information processing and to what extent our conscious perception is determined by attention and predictions. In Chapter 2, I showed that spatial attention and predictions modulate visual information processing stages, but only after the first feedforward sweep of cortical information processing. In Chapter 3, I demonstrated that predictions facilitate both subjective perceptual report and conscious access, yet, importantly, only when prediction-initiating stimuli were also consciously accessed. Next, in Chapter 4, I investigated temporal attentional selection in rapidly changing input conditions. I found that attentional selection feedback did not modulate early-stage cortical representations of stimuli and that early representational dynamic was not a critical determinant of conscious access in rapidly changing input conditions. Lastly, in Chapter 5, I examined neural processes accompanying participants' incorrect perceptual reports. Intriguingly, I found a neural dissociation between the veridical sensory input and perceptually maintained visual information characterizing misreports during perceptual decision-making, suggesting that top-down factors alone could have critically shaped conscious perception. Together, these findings provide new insights into how attention and prediction modulate visual information processing and highlight the constructive nature of our conscious visual perception