Consciousness and Attention: To what extent individual differences in consciousness are predictable by evoked lateralized EEG activity

Previous studies showed that attention is likely to play an important role in consciousness. To build further on this, we were interested in whether we could determine individual differences in visual consciousness, and to which extent these differences could be predicted by evoked lateralizations. To address these questions, an endogenous visuospatial attention task was conducted in which participants had to respond to stimuli at either the left or right visual field. To map individual differences in consciousness, these stimuli were masked after a varying time interval by backward masking. A recently developed method for analyzing EEG, the lateralized power spectra (LPS), was applied on event-related potentials to map evoked activity. Results showed that individuals differ to what extent they were able to consciously perceive stimuli. However, these differences could not be predicted by evoked lateralizations. Additionally, our study determined a small but significant role for evoked activity in explaining the role of neuronal activity underlying the attentional orienting to visuospatial stimuli.