Abstract
Understanding how consciousness arises from neural activity remains one of the biggest challenges for neuroscience. Numerous theories have been proposed in recent years, each gaining independent empirical support. Currently, there is no comprehensive, quantitative and theory-neutral overview of the field that enables an evaluation of how theoretical frameworks interact with empirical research. We provide a bird’s eye view of studies that interpreted their findings in light of at least one of four leading neuroscientific theories of consciousness (N = 412 experiments), asking how methodological choices of the researchers might affect the final conclusions. We found that supporting a specific theory can be predicted solely from methodological choices, irrespective of findings. Furthermore, most studies interpret their findings post hoc, rather than a priori testing critical predictions of the theories. Our results highlight challenges for the field and provide researchers with an open-access website (https://ContrastDB.tau.ac.il) to further analyse trends in the neuroscience of consciousness.
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Data availability
The database we collected is shared on the Open Science Framework96 (https://osf.io/avz8b/). Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
All analysis scripts used in this paper are shared on the Open Science Framework96 (https://osf.io/avz8b/).
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Acknowledgements
This project was made possible through the support of grants from Templeton World Charity Foundation Inc. (no. TWCF0389 to L. Melloni, M.P. and L. Mudrik; no. TWCF0599 to L. Mudrik) and the National Science Foundation (no. BCS1829470 to M.P.). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Templeton World Charity Foundation Inc. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. L.Mudrik is a CIFAR Tanenbaum Fellow in the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness programme.
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The ConTraSt database was conceived by all authors. I.Y. collected and classified the papers in consultation with L. Mudrik and, when necessary, with L. Melloni and M.P. I.Y. performed all the analyses, created the website and drafted the manuscript. L. Mudrik, L. Melloni and M.P. edited the manuscript.
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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Ned Block, Axel Cleeremans and Boris Kotchoubey for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.
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Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figs. 1–11, Tables 1–9, Notes and Results.
Source data
Source Data Fig. 1
Number of collected papers after (‘post’) and before (‘pre’) the screening stage of our paper selection process.
Source Data Fig. 3
Number of experiments mentioning the theories in the introduction, being a priori designed to test theory predictions (theory driven) or post-hoc interpreting their findings in light of the theories, in experiments supporting and challenging the theories (Fig. 3a,b, respectively), and across theories for each year (Fig. 3c).
Source Data Fig. 4
Accuracy and AUC of the ROCs of the random forest classifier analysis (Fig. 4a,b, respectively). On the last sheet, the full data on the classification of theory support for each experiment in the database are provided.
Source Data Fig. 5
Frequency of each parameter value within experiments supporting each theory (separate sheet for each parameter).
Source Data Fig. 6
Brain areas reported in each panel, split according to the ‘consciousness type’ being studied (including all of the papers supporting each theory, or limiting the data to experiments focusing on content consciousness).
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Yaron, I., Melloni, L., Pitts, M. et al. The ConTraSt database for analysing and comparing empirical studies of consciousness theories. Nat Hum Behav 6, 593–604 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01284-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01284-5
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