Decoding visual consciousness from human brain signals

Despite many years of research on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), it is still unclear how the detailed contents of consciousness are represented in the human brain. It is often assumed that specific contents of consciousness are encoded in dedicated core NCCs – one for each different aspect of conscious experience. Now, the approach of multivariate decoding provides a novel framework for studying the relationship between consciousness and content-selective processing in more detail. This approach makes it possible to assess how conscious experience is encoded in the brain and how the encoding of sensory information is affected when it enters awareness.