INTREPID

To understand consciousness, we need to uncover how different brain structures and patterns of cell activity give rise to it.
​There exist at least a dozen noteworthy theories of consciousness, but it remains unclear which of them is more likely to be correct.
This new research project led by the Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam, and involving partners in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany, will test key empirical predictions from three leading theories of consciousness: Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and two different accounts of Predictive Processing—Active Inference (PP-AI) and Neurorepresentationalism (PP-NREP).
​These three theories make incompatible predictions about the brain mechanisms underlying sensory processing, conscious perception and the role of actions and agency in consciousness. The project takes the form of a Structured Adversarial Collaboration (STAC) to carry out three main experiments (including replications) and to analyse the resulting data in a carefully controlled manner. It brings together theorists, experimentalists, and other experts working in close interaction.

In the first experiment, researchers use optogenetics to inactivate silent neurons in the visual cortex of mice, and measure if and how this manipulation of the sensory brain network affects behaviour. The second experiment investigates how the blind spot of the retina, or stroke-related damage to visual brain areas, affects perception and subjective experience of space. The third experiment combines an optical illusion known as motion-induced blindness and neuroimaging techniques to test whether actively looking at objects of a scene, in contrast to only passively looking, is necessary for their conscious perception.
The project will deliver outputs for different target audiences, from specialists of consciousness research and related fields to a broader scientific community including cognitive scientists, neurobiologists, AI researchers and roboticists, philosophers, and clinicians. The project’s findings are expected to advance our understanding of consciousness and to contribute more generally to our knowledge of the brain.