A neural representation of invisibility: when stimulus-specific neural activity negatively correlates with conscious experience

Although visual awareness of an object typically increases neural responses, we identify a neural response that increases prior to perceptual disappearances, and that scales with the amount of invisibility reported during perceptual filling-in. These findings challenge long-held assumptions regarding the neural correlates of consciousness and entrained visually evoked potentials, by showing that the strength of stimulus-specific neural activity can encode the conscious absence of a stimulus.