This study investigated whether second-order conditional (SOC) sequences can be learned through observation by combining rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) with a serial reaction time task (SRTT). Sixty participants observed either repeated SOC sequences or random sequences during RSVP, then completed explicit learning tasks and an SRTT. Explicit learning tasks showed no evidence of sequence knowledge. In the SRTT, groups did not differ in RTs, but the control group accumulated more errors in later blocks. Furthermore, RTs during the first two blocks predicted performance in recovery after interference in later blocks in the experimental group. This RT pattern was also reflected in the speed-accuracy trade-off as captured by inverse efficiency scores (IES) but only partially by the balanced integration scores (BIS). Finally, in the SRTT the experimental group reported higher awareness of sequence repetitiveness. These findings indicate that RSVP exposure may foster subtle and predominantly implicit learning of SOC sequences.

Navigating crowded urban environments can significantly deplete attentional resources over time, making individuals less attentive and more prone to distractions. While previous research suggests that natural settings can help replenish attentional resources depleted by urban life, little is known about whether similar benefits may arise from tranquil artistic settings, like museums and art exhibitions. Here, we drew on the Attention Restoration Theory to test the restorative effects of a museum visit compared to a walk in an urban environment, using a within-subject pre-post design and a combination of self-reported, behavioral, and physiological measures. Participants completed two computer tasks assessing working memory and attentional control and filled out questionnaires assessing perceived restoration, emotions and stress before and after either a museum visit or an urban walk. Physiological activity was monitored by measuring blink rate and pupil size via an eye-tracker. Results showed greater improvement in attentional control abilities following the museum visit. Additionally, self-reported measures indicated that the museum visit was perceived as being more restorative than the urban walk. Similar improvements were observed for working memory, stress and emotions after both a museum visit and an urban walk. These findings suggest that immersion in artistic environments, like museums, can enhance key attention abilities more effectively than an urban walk, enabling individuals to replenish attention resources and become less distractible afterwards. Our results are encouraging in promoting the beneficial effects of museum visits on attention restoration.

Brightness perception can diverge sharply from physical luminance due to contextual cues, but whether such illusory brightness is registered without awareness and whether it speeds entry into awareness remain open questions. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to test the glare illusion, which increases perceived brightness without changing central luminance. In Experiment 1, we measured breakthrough time (BT) and found no advantage for glare over physically identical controls, indicating that subjective brightness alone does not reliably hasten access to awareness. In Experiment 2, we selectively suppressed the illusion's inducer gradients while leaving the central region visible; here the glare condition showed shorter BTs, suggesting that contextual structure can facilitate detection under suppression. In Experiment 3, participants discriminated both physically brighter stimuli and illusory brightness above chance while the stimuli remained suppressed, demonstrating unconscious processing of brightness information. Together, these findings dissociate unconscious encoding from access to awareness: illusory brightness can be processed without consciousness, yet it does not uniformly accelerate emergence into awareness unless the relevant contextual cues are available to the visual system.

This study examines how visual and verbal working memory contributes to episodic future thinking and whether their effects vary across temporal directions while controlling the effects of working memory capacity. Using a dual-task paradigm, participants recalled past and imagined future events under single- and dual-task conditions while performing visual or verbal 2-back tasks. Results showed that episodic future thinking requires more cognitive resources than episodic memory, evidenced by longer response times and reduced phenomenological richness. Performance under visual and verbal working memory loads was similar, indicating that overall working memory capacity contributes to episodic future thinking. However, past events were rated as less important and emotionally intense under a verbal working memory load, suggesting a crucial role for verbal working memory in episodic recall. These findings reveal the modality-specific and capacity-driven mechanisms shaping mental time travel, emphasizing the role of working memory in the representations of past and future events.

Hallucination research is a fast‑growing, inherently interdisciplinary field bridging psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy. This article maps out key conceptual and methodological issues underlying the study of hallucinations. We begin by unpacking core theoretical issues - how hallucinations differ from other perceptual alterations, whether they form a single construct or several, and how these distinctions influence study design and interpretation. Next, we review the most commonly used experimental paradigms. A clear distinction is drawn between tasks that measure enduring hallucinatory tendencies and those that capture hallucinations in real time. We also review the most widely used rating instruments - including confidence scales - and discuss the phenomenological approach, which foregrounds participants' first‑person experience. The final section offers a concise, though not exhaustive, checklist of variables researchers must account for - ranging from sensory modality and context to cognitive style, affective state, and cultural background. Taken together, the article serves as an entry‑level guide, posing critical questions that every researcher should answer before designing a study on hallucinations.

Social cognition, encompassing the mental processes involved in perceiving, interpreting, and responding to social information, remains a complex domain to model, particularly when considered in relation to self-awareness. As social cognition requires awareness of others, effective self-awareness is often assumed to be crucial for this process. Yet, the role of self-awareness in social cognition is still debated. This systematic review investigates the link between social cognition and self-awareness in adult populations. Following a PRISMA-guided literature search, 8,973 articles were identified, and 192 were selected for full-text screening. Eighty-eight studies met the inclusion criteria, which required quantifying at least one social cognitive process and one self-awareness component and exploring their relationship in healthy adults or patients with neurological or psychiatric conditions. Most studies focused on theory of mind, emotion recognition, and empathy, with insight and metacognition being the primary self-awareness dimensions explored. Theory of mind was most commonly linked to insight, while emotion recognition and empathy were associated with metacognition. Results varied depending on the cognitive processes studied, the population examined, and the methods employed. Notably, stronger correlations were observed when objective measures of self-awareness were used compared to subjective ones. Results point toward a potential bidirectional relationship. However, methodological heterogeneity, including variations in tools, constructs, and statistical analyses, may account for some conflicting findings. This systematic review emphasizes the need for integrative models, refined methodologies, and further research in underrepresented populations.

Studies have reported that the contents of everyday involuntary autobiographical memories may at times be influenced (primed) by the contents of ongoing preoccupations. However, these studies did not manipulate (nor simulate) preoccupations experimentally, and therefore causal connections between preoccupations and the priming of involuntary memories cannot be established with their findings. The goal of the current study was to establish a causal link between preoccupations and involuntary memory production. Participants in a repetitive thinking group thought about a single topic (food) repeatedly, after which they were engaged in an involuntary memory task (the vigilance task), which contained a handful of food related cues. The performance of repetitive thinking participants on the vigilance task was compared to the performance of control participants, who in place of the repetitive thinking task, thought about various, different topics (e.g., think about setting goals; imagine sitting in a chair). The results showed that compared to the control group, the repetitive thinking group produced more food related involuntary memories, as well as more involuntary memories overall. The results support the idea that one's preoccupations can influence involuntary remembering, and we argue preoccupations can be a priming source for everyday involuntary memories, among other potential sources.

Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies have typically included just one or at most two manipulations, leaving it unclear whether each manipulation has a unique effect on accuracy vs. confidence. Subjects indicated whether a tilted Gabor patch was oriented clockwise or counterclockwise from 45°. We included manipulations of the task-defining feature (tilt offset) and four auxiliary, non-task-defining features (size, duration, spatial frequency, and noise level). We found that the four auxiliary manipulations had fairly similar effects on accuracy and confidence. In contrast, the task-defining tilt offset manipulation stood out by affecting accuracy more strongly than confidence. In addition, tilt offset exhibited a supraadditive interaction with all other manipulations for both accuracy and confidence, whereas all auxiliary manipulations exhibited either no interactions or subadditive interactions with each other. Furthermore, tilt offset was the only manipulation for which confidence in incorrect trials decreased with increasing difficulty, while all auxiliary manipulations exhibited the opposite trend. Overall, our results reveal a noticeable similarity among the effects of all four auxiliary (non-task-defining) manipulations on accuracy and confidence, as well as a prominent difference between them and the task-defining manipulation (tilt offset). These results enable a priori predictions of how novel manipulations would affect accuracy and confidence.

Previous research has reported inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and tendencies for future-oriented mind wandering. To address this, the present study incorporated self-relevant elements into probes to further specify self-relevant, future-oriented (self-future) mind wandering, aiming to clarify its relationship with WMC and explore the functional connectivity mediating this association. Ninety-four participants completed the sustained attention to response task (SART) with thought probes, the operation span (OSPAN) task, and the reading span (RSPAN) task. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data were also collected. The findings demonstrated a significant positive association between WMC and self-future mind wandering. Additionally, functional connectivity between the left lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and the left lateral premotor cortex (LPMC) was positively associated with both WMC and self-future mind wandering. Further analyses revealed that LPFC-LPMC connectivity statistically mediated the relationship between WMC and self-future mind wandering. Conversely, self-future mind wandering also mediated the association between WMC and LPFC-LPMC connectivity. These findings are consistent with the context regulation hypothesis and provide insight into the underlying mechanisms. Specifically, LPFC-LPMC connectivity may link to the integration of motor sequence predictions and anticipated speech and nonverbal communication, whereas the reverse mediation suggests that self-future mind wandering may contribute to shaping neural connectivity associated with executive control.

Evaluating ongoing thoughts during behavioral tasks can offer valuable insight into underlying cognitive processes. Yet, despite their ubiquity, dimensions of thought are often overlooked in experimental psychology, where researchers typically prioritize the assessment of task performance and neglect the accompanying mental experience. In this study, we used experience sampling to investigate the phenomenology of task-unrelated and task-relevant thoughts during memory encoding for verbal and visual stimuli. In two experiments, participants studied words and images matched in intrinsic memorability before completing a recognition memory test. During the study phase, participants responded to several thought probes at pseudorandom intervals, rating dimensions of task-relatedness, awareness, unguidedness, inner speech, visual imagery, auditory imagery, bodily sensation, and emotion. Our results revealed a robust effect across experiments between task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and recognition failures, suggesting attention lapses interfere with encoding. Meta-awareness during TUTs showed a protective effect on encoding in Experiment 1 that did not replicate in Experiment 2, and modality-matched TUTs (e.g., visual TUT during image study) did not differentially impair memory. During task-oriented states, verbal stimuli evoked more auditory imagery, while visual stimuli evoked more unguidedness, visual imagery, and emotion. Importantly, certain on-task thought qualities, such as awareness and inner speech, were uniquely linked to enhanced memory performance, suggesting that task-relevant thoughts are heterogeneous in their role in processing and encoding. By emphasizing the intricate relationship between external stimuli, inner experience, and memory encoding, this work calls for a more integrative approach that incorporates phenomenological perspectives in the study of cognition.

The human brain constructs a boundary between self and world by distinguishing self-generated sensory events from external ones. For events that are self-initiated, the brain attenuates its response, what is known as the sensory suppression effect. This effect is regarded as a proxy of the sense of agency, i.e., our feeling of being subjective agents controlling our actions and ensuing events in the world. In deep meditative states, where the self-world boundary blurs, phenomenological reports indicate a reduced or absent sense of agency, accompanied by neural oscillatory changes. However, definitive neural markers of agency have not been identified in these states. In our preregistered study, we engaged 46 experienced meditators in a button-pressing task during Magnetoencephalography (MEG) monitoring to assess how meditation-induced self-boundary dissolution affects sensory suppression. Participants' self-reports indicated partial attainment of deep meditative states during the task. At the overall group level, dissolution states did not significantly modulate sensory suppression. However, individual variations showed a positive correlation between the depth of meditation and sensory suppression magnitude. This suggests that variation in the induced states might have obscured group-level effects. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between meditation depth, agency suspension, intention awareness, and sensory suppression.

Dreams offer insight into how individual differences shape conscious experience in the absence of external input or task demands. This study examines whether synesthesia is linked to distinct patterns in dream content, suggesting underlying differences in cognitive architecture. Leveraging the statistical power of large-scale, naturalistic data, we analyzed 2,337 dream reports from Reddit, comparing 1,169 reports from self-identified synesthetes with 1,168 matched controls. Semantic embedding models and logistic regression achieved modest classification performance, indicating group-level differences in language use. Topic modeling revealed four themes-digital, interpersonal regret, diverse worlds, and violent conflict-that were significantly more prevalent in synesthete dreams. These results suggest that trait-level cognitive organization, as expressed in synesthetic perception, extends across states of consciousness and shapes the thematic content of dreams. The findings support theoretical accounts of dreaming as continuous with waking cognition and demonstrate how stable neurocognitive traits manifest in unstructured, self-generated thought.

A "sense of agency" is the feeling that one is the cause of events in the world. The presence of others has been shown to create a diffusion of responsibility and thus reduce individuals' explicit ratings of control. This notion has recently been conceptualised as "interfered agency". The current study investigated both explicit and implicit measures of agency in an interfered agency paradigm. In two online experiments, we showed that when being induced to feel that they were working with an artificial virtual agent who could potentially act in a shared task, participants felt less control i.e., explicit measure. We also found greater temporal binding (an implicit measure) implying a stronger sense of agency; that is, the opposite pattern of results compared with the explicit measure. Across the two experiments conducted online, we demonstrated that these effects were due to the implied ability for the partner to act and not an effect of social presence per se. We propose that explicit measures of agency reflect the conscious attribution of responsibility, while implicit measures reflect the strength of the representation of the causal links between action and effect. These data reinforce recent theoretical developments in our understanding of the sense of agency and social agency when working with an artificial partner.

Humans' tendency to attribute mental states to robots positively correlates with the increasingly human-like appearance of the robots. As eyes have been suggested to be "the windows to the soul", in the present study we investigated whether the presence or absence of facial features appearing as eyes in humanoid robots affects how perceivers attribute mental capacities of agency and experience to robots. We created images of highly realistic humanoid robots with full bodies and showed these robots either with the eyes or without the eyes. In Experiment 1, attribution of agency and experience was measured with self-evaluation questionnaires, whereas in Experiment 2, we used the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Results from both explicit and implicit measurements showed that humans attribute higher levels of agency and experience to humanoid robots with eyes (i.e. eyelike facial features) compared to robots without eyes. The results have great practical relevance to humanoid robot technology as the presence or absence of eyes in humanoid robots could have a fundamental effect on human-robot interaction.

There is debate about how many items can be represented in visual consciousness at once. Evidence against the view that visual consciousness consists of many detailed items has come from a study using the partial-report paradigm. De Gardelle et al. (2009) showed that rotated letters shown in non-cued (i.e., unattended) parts of a briefly presented letter array are sometimes illusorily perceived as upright. Presumably, the expectation that letters are generally seen upright modulated a rotated letter's visual representation towards an upright one. The present study elaborates on this finding by comparing reports of rotated letters to two kinds of controls: letters shown upright, and letters that were not shown in the preceding stimulus. Results showed that participants were able to discriminate non-cued letters from not-shown letters, providing evidence that such letters remained available for some time after stimulus offset. This was found for letters that were shown upright but also for letters shown inverted. Upright letters were reported as upright more often than not-shown letters were, showing that information about letter orientation was preserved. Inverted letters were also reported as upright but, importantly, not more so than not-shown letters were. This replicates the earlier finding that inverted letters can be reported as upright but shows that such errors might be attributable to non-perceptual stages of processing. Post-perceptual biases influencing reports of visual representations might present a new ground to distinguish between phenomenally conscious contents and reports thereof.

Metacognition is one of the cognitive functions that is shown to be altered in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Studies focusing on metacognitive efficiency have demonstrated disrupted precision of confidence estimates in OCD. However, the data of those studies may have been contaminated by the overestimation of metacognitive efficiency resulting from the use of the staircase method. We used a two-alternative forced-choice task in which difficulty was held constant within each block but varied across blocks throughout the task. No feedback was given to the participants. We collected data from 161 healthy university students with varying degrees of tendencies of OCD symptoms. Contrary to the previous literature, participants with a higher obsessive-compulsive tendency had higher metacognitive efficiency. Applying the drift-diffusion modeling approach to the first-order decisions of participants revealed that participants with a higher obsessive-compulsive tendency had lower efficiency in integrating perceptual information and less cautious thresholds. Finally, we investigated post-error slowing and found that participants with a higher obsessive-compulsive tendency exhibited limited adaptation of responses to errors and low confidence levels. Overall, our results suggest that having a higher obsessive-compulsive tendency is associated with sufficient metacognitive capacity but also with limited utilization of the metacognitive information for behavioral adaptation.

Prior work shows that highly boredom prone individuals report feeling diminished levels of agency. The current study investigated the possibility that the highly boredom prone would be more sensitive (and less tolerant) to disruptions to their own agency. Participants played the video game Pong, with delays gradually introduced between their initiation of movements of the paddle and actual movements on the screen as a means of disrupting agency. In addition, participants had the option to reset the game (which also reset delays to zero) as often as they liked. State boredom ratings were negatively associated with subjective ratings of control, a proxy for agency, during game play. Frustration ratings were shown to mediate the association between state boredom and control ratings. For participants who made a minimum of two resets during game play, boredom proneness was predictive of the total number of resets, such that those higher in boredom proneness tended to reset the game more frequently. Further work is needed to determine how the relation between boredom and agency might influence the failure to launch into action that is characteristic of boredom proneness.

Dream lucidity, the ability to recognize and reflect on one's dream state, has been linked to heightened memory monitoring. Although individuals with high trait lucidity often rate imagined and perceived events as similarly vivid, they nonetheless perform better in distinguishing memory sources. This study examined whether this advantage reflects greater subjective specificity, the retrieval of more distinct representational details, supported by recollection. Forty-one participants completed a source memory task involving object names that were either imagined or paired with images. During a later recognition test with EEG recording, participants judged each item's prior occurrence and its source. Trait lucidity was assessed via a multi-day self-report inventory and lucid dream frequency. Participants with higher trait lucidity tended to show greater source memory accuracy, especially for externally perceived items. Event-related potential (ERP) and time-frequency analyses indicated stronger left parietal old/new effects for imagined items, and greater frontal gamma-band power for perceived items. Both effects were positively correlated with trait lucidity (p < 0.05) and source accuracy (p < 0.05). Theta-band activity also predicted source accuracy for both item types. These findings may suggest that high-lucidity individuals engage recollection and familiarity processes to enhance subjective specificity, leading to more precise discrimination between imagined and perceived experiences.

Hypnotic suggestions can modulate unintentional emotional processing. However, the specific contributions of hypnotic induction and suggestion - two central components of the hypnotic procedure - remain unclear. The present study aims to disentangle the effects of hypnotic induction and emotional numbing suggestion on the modulation of attentional bias in two experiments. In Experiment 1, high suggestible individuals (N = 34) performed an online emotional Stroop task in a two-by-two within-subject experimental design in which we crossed hypnotic induction and suggestion. Results show that both the emotional numbing suggestion - whether delivered within or outside the hypnotic context - and the relaxation-based hypnotic induction led to equivalent modulation of attentional bias. Experiment 2 tested the potential confounding effects of demand characteristics and of session repetition on the modulation of attentional bias in low suggestible individuals (N = 38). Results from this second experiment show no significant modulation of attentional bias across the four experimental sessions in this group. Our findings suggest that relaxation-based hypnotic induction and emotional numbing suggestion contribute to the modulation of attentional bias in high suggestible individuals. The results are discussed in line with socio-cognitive perspectives of the hypnotic induction, acting as a relaxation suggestion supporting emotional numbing effects.

Habitual behaviour is commonly assumed to operate outside of conscious control, deliberation, or awareness, driven by stimulus-response (S-R) associations rather than goal-directed evaluation. Here, we investigate whether habitual instrumental behaviours can be triggered by stimuli that are prevented from entering subjective awareness with subliminal presentation. In a preregistered within-subjects study (N after exclusions = 75), we examined this question by employing a symmetrical outcome revaluation task. Participants underwent extensive instrumental training, forming strong S-R associations, before completing two testing stages: a conscious stage with fully visible stimuli, and an unconscious stage where stimuli were rendered subliminal via visual masking. In the conscious condition, participants exhibited habitual control, responding more accurately to habit-congruent (still-valuable, still-non-valuable) stimuli than to habit-incongruent (upvalued, devalued) stimuli, replicating prior findings. However, in the unconscious condition participants did not exhibit above-chance accuracy, and responses were not biased toward habitual actions, suggesting that subliminal stimuli were unable to elicit either habitual or goal-directed responses. These findings challenge the notion that habitual control of instrumental behaviour can function independently of stimulus awareness and suggest that conscious access to action-relevant cues may be necessary even for well-established S-R associations to guide behaviour.

Sense of control (SoC) over our actions is crucial for regulating our behavior. SoC arises from low-level processes, such as immediate sensory feedback, and high-level processes, such as performance evaluation. Studies using simple action-effect tasks suggest that people rely more on low-level sensory than on high-level cues of control. Yet, it remains unclear how these cues interact to shape the SoC in complex, goal-directed environments that require continuous behavioral adaptation. To investigate this, 50 participants performed a challenging motor control task akin to a video game, steering a spaceship along a continuously changing path. Sensorimotor control was manipulated by varying task difficulty via input noise across experimental blocks. After each trial, participants received negative, neutral, or positive feedback, followed by rating of their SoC. Linear mixed model analyses revealed that both sensory and evaluative feedback influenced the SoC. SoC decreased with increasing task difficulty. Furthermore, independent of difficulty, negative feedback reduced the SoC whereas positive feedback enhanced it, with a stronger effect for negative feedback. Notably, the effects of task difficulty and negative feedback were influenced by participants' depressive symptoms and their external locus of control, suggesting that generalized control beliefs modulate task-specific control experience. These findings indicate that SoC is informed by both low-level sensorimotor cues and high-level affective feedback, suggesting an integration of multiple types of information to assess control in dynamic task contexts where action-effect contingencies are extended over time. Crucially, these effects depend on trait-like control beliefs, highlighting the need to account for individual differences when investigating situated control experience.