Neural Substrates and Temporal Characteristics for Consciousness, Brief Sensory Memory, and Short-Term Memory (STM) Systems

Neural Substrates for Consciousness Human visual consciousness certainly consists of many levels. For instance, when one views Leon Harmon’s painting of Lincoln, three levels of consciousness may occur: the awareness of the colors and patterns in the painting, the awareness of a face in the drawing, and the awareness that the face is Lincoln’s. The visual consciousness at the first level (i.e., the vivid visual consciousness of patterns and colors) may occur without any sense of object recognition. Counterintuitive or not, vivid visual consciousness in human is monocular! This idea has its root in the “suppression theory ” of perception proposed by some early students of binocular rivalry (BR) such as Porta (1593) and Dutour (1760). BR is a striking phenomenon where a viewer experiences alternating period