Connectionists: PhD position with neural modelling component

[Howard Bowman]

Identifying the Role of Conscious Perception: a Neuroimaging and Computational Investigation
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Dr H Bowman, Dr D Cruse (School of Psychology, University of Birmingham)

(Deadline: Sunday, January 09, 2022)

About the Project

The question of what conscious perception is for remains a key, largely unanswered, question for the scientific study of consciousness and indeed for our whole understanding of mind. In fact, a substantial part of the scientific study of consciousness has focused on showing how sophisticated subconscious processing can be, seemingly leaving little room for a "special" purpose for conscious experience.

We have recently presented empirical evidence, which suggests that the subconscious brain is limited in its capacity to represent episodic information (Avilés, Bowman & Wyble, 2020; Bowman, Filetti, Alsufyani, Janssen & Su, 2014). By episodic, we are particularly emphasizing the capacity to associate percepts with the passage of time, something that we humans do so easily consciously that we hardly notice it. This work uses Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) to present stimuli on the fringe of awareness. In Avilés, Bowman & Wyble (2020), we showed that the capacity to consciously perceive a stimulus does not benefit from repeating it unless it has been consciously perceived previously. Repetition is a key episodic property, i.e. to know that a presentation of a stimulus is a repetition, the brain has to have a memory of a previous episode of experiencing the stimulus. Additionally, if the RSVP stream of stimuli is slowed down sufficiently that the viewer consciously observes every stimulus, it becomes trivially easy to perform the task of detecting the repeating item.

The strong claim, then, is that a specific capacity provided by conscious perception is to lay down freely-recallable episodic memories of previous experiences. We now have extensive behavioural evidence for this hypothesis, a good deal of which will shortly appear in print. We are thus at a perfect stage to 1) characterise the neural correlates that support this formation of freely-recallable episodic memories, and 2) explain these findings with the computational theory that underlies our work in this area: the Simultaneous Type/ Serial Token model (Bowman & Wyble, 2007). Accordingly, we are proposing a PhD to work on one or both of these topics.

The first of these research activities, characterising neural correlates, could employ fMRI, MEG or EEG (all of which are available to us), with the latter two being particularly relevant because of their high temporal resolution. This line of research could take our existing RSVP behavioural paradigms and seek to identify neural components that are engaged when a stimulus presentation leads to the later detection of a repetition. This would give a new way to identify the neural components that are specific to conscious processing, with relevance to debates concerning whether the neural correlates of conscious processing reside in the sensory processing pathways or at a later, brain-scale, stage. Oscillatory correlates of conscious processing and episodic memory formation are of particular interest (Parish, Hanslmayr & Bowman, 2018).

The second research activity, computational modelling, would involve simulating the repetition effects and resulting correlates of conscious processing, with the Simultaneous Type/ Serial Token - a well attested theory of temporal attention and episodic encoding into working-memory (Bowman & Wyble, 2007). This neural network model is consistent with brain-scale state theories of conscious perception, such as the global workspace.

For further details, contact Professor Howard Bowman (H.Bowman at bham.ac.uk)

Funding Notes

This PhD is funded by the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership (MIBTP). Funding covers fees and stipend.
For more details, look at these pages:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/mibtp/
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/mibtp/index.aspx

Both home and International students can apply (EU students are now classed as international).

References
Avilés, Bowman & Wyble (2020). On the limits of evidence accumulation of the preconscious percept. Cognition, 195.
Bowman & Wyble (2007). The simultaneous type, serial token model of temporal attention and working memory. Psychological review, 114(1), 38.
Bowman et al. (2014). Countering countermeasures: detecting identity lies by detecting conscious breakthrough. PloS one, 9(3).
Parish, Hanslmayr & Bowman (2018). The sync/desync model: How a synchronized hippocampus and a desynchronized neocortex code memories. Journal of Neuroscience, 38(14), 3428-3440.

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Professor Howard Bowman (PhD)
Professor of Cognition & Logic in Computing at Uni Kent, and
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in Psychology at Uni Birmingham
(visiting at Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London)

Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems and the School of Computing, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF, UK
email: H.Bowman at kent.ac.uk<mailto:H.Bowman at kent.ac.uk>
WWW: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/hb5/

School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK

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