This is a response to Ian Phillips and Jorge Morales, "The Fundamental Problem with No-Cognition Paradigms," Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 202

Block, Ned

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Trends in Cognitive SciencesTICS 2002 No. of Pages 2LetterFinessing the BoredMonkey ProblemNed Block1,*By recording from microelectrodes inmonkey prefrontal cortex (PFC), re-searchers have decoded the contents ofconscious perception in cognitive areas(lateral prefrontal cortex) in conditions inwhich perceptions are not determined bythe stimulus, binocular rivalry, and ﬂashsuppression [1–4]. As I noted in my recentTrends in Cognitive Sciences article [5],such results cannot be taken to supportcognitive theories of consciousness be-cause of the ‘bored monkey problem’:the idea that subjects whose only task isﬁxating a dot may have thoughts aboutthe noticeably different stimuli, causingprefrontal differences that do not reﬂectprefrontal consciousness. This was thenegative point of my article, and in theircommentary Phillips and Morales (P&M)[6] do not dispute it.What they do dispute is my positive point:that Brascamp et al. [7] have evadedthe bored monkey problem. One innova-tion introduced by Brascamp et al. is touse stimuli that have two related usefulproperties. The ﬁrst is that the stimuli donot afford any ready-to-hand cognitive cat-egories for characterizing them other thanas moving dots. Subjects cannot sayto themselves: ‘There is the face again.’P&M say ‘Nothing in Brascamp et al.'smethodology prevents observers engagingin extensive cognitive processing’, both inthe rivalry transitions and the similar real(objective) transitions. However, P&M areneglecting the fact that the stimuli do notnaturally draw cognitive processingin either the rivalry case or the real case.P&M focus on the distinguishability of therivalrous transitions from the nonrivalrousreal (objective) transitions, emphasizingreplay subtraction. However, the aforemen-tioned monkey experiments [1–4] do notuse any form of replay subtraction. This re-search does involve comparisons betweenperception of the rivalrous stimuli and per-ception of real stimuli, but the purpose is toascertainwhich neurons respond to the per-cept rather than to the stimulus.The second useful property of thesestimuli is that they are subjectively differentfrom each other without being con-spicuously different. P&M [6] say: ‘Yetindiscriminable stimuli look the same.’However, although the stimuli are notnoticeably different, they are subjectivelydifferent: they differ from each other in thedirections of movement of each dot andin the overall directions of motion of thedots. Indeed, they are sufﬁciently subjec-tively different to trigger conscious rivalry.I mentioned [5] that rivalry occurs in fruitﬂies and can occur in unconscious per-ception. P&M conclude that the rivalryin Brascamp et al. might be invisible.However, one cannot generalize in thisway from rivalry when subjects do notconsciously see the stimuli. Rivalry in-volves the dominance of one whole neuralcoalition over another. I know of no evi-dence that rivalry in the case of con-sciously seen stimuli can somehow sliceoff the conscious part of the coalition. Thecompeting stimuli are subjectively but notnoticeably different. Not being noticeablydifferent, rivalry transitions are less likely todraw more attention than real transitions –as conﬁrmed by Brascamp et al.Would the differences between the neu-ral representations of such stimuli bedecodable in the brain at all given how sim-ilar they are? Recall that the explanation ofbinocular rivalry is that pools of neuronsthat represent each of the stimuli are mutu-ally inhibitory. In the presence of neuralnoise, one pool wins out. The dominantpool of neurons then weakens due to ad-aptation, the other pool taking over in theTrwinner-takes-all process of perception,then the cycle repeats. If this weakeningand strengthening of content representa-tions were happening in PFC, it would bedetectable, either with fMRI or with electro-physiological methods (microelectrodesinserted into the cortex). Not ﬁnding differ-ences between the rivalrous changes andthe real changes is evidence against PFCdifferences and hence against cognitivetheories of conscious contents.This point interacts with the issue of thenot-noticeably different stimuli. With read-ily characterizable (e.g., face/house) stim-uli, weakening and strengthening in visualcortex could have caused a cognitivereﬂection of that weakening and strength-ening in PFC, misleading us as to the roleof consciousness in PFC.Returning to the comparison of the rival-rous transitions with the nonrivalrous realtransitions, P&M concede that failure toﬁnd PFC differences between rivalrousand real transitions shows that the causesof rivalrous transitions are not to be foundin PFC. However, they go on to say thatthe conscious contents may nonethelessbe in PFC. They use this point to concludethat methodologies that compare real withrivalrous transitions – including subtractingreplay from rivalry – ‘cannot discriminaterival hypotheses concerning NCC's’(neural correlate of consciousness).Note that the neural bases of transitionsand contents are linked. In particular, ifperceptual contents are based in PFC,the strengthening and weakening ofcontent representations that are intrinsicto binocular rivalry would make rivalroustransitions neurally different from realtransitions, as noted above. Contentsand differences in content have conse-quences for transitions. So, failure to ﬁnddifferences between rivalrous transitionsand real transitions in cognitive areasof PFC disconﬁrms cognitive theories ofconscious contents.ends in Cognitive Sciences, Month 2020, Vol. xx, No. xx 1Trends in Cognitive SciencesAcknowledgmentsThanks to Jan Brascamp andMatthiasMichel for help-ful discussion.1Department of Philosophy, New York University, 5 WashingtonPlace, New York, NY 10003, USA*Correspondence:ned.block@nyu.edu (N. Block).https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.12.012© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.2 Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Month 2020, Vol. xx, No. xxReferences1. Panagiotaropoulos, T.I. et al. (2012) Neuronal dischargesand gamma oscillations explicitly reﬂect visual con-sciousness in the lateral prefrontal cortex. Neuron 74,924–9352. Safavi, S. et al. (2014) Is the frontal lobe involved inconscious perception? Front. Psychol. 5, 10633. Kapoor, V. (2019) Neuronal discharges in the prefrontalcortex reﬂect changes in conscious perception during ano report binocular rivalry paradigm. In 23rd Annual Meetingof the Association for the Scientiﬁc Study of Consciousness(ASSC 23)4. Kapoor, V. et al. (2018) Spiking activity in the prefrontalcortex reﬂects spontaneous perceptual transitionsduring a no report binocular rivalry paradigm. In Posterpresented at 11th FENS Forum of Neuroscience, Berlin,Germany5. Block, N. (2019) What is wrong with the no-reportparadigm and how to ﬁx it. Trends Cogn. Sci. 23,1003–10136. Phillips, I. and Morales, J. (2020) The fundamentalproblem with no-cognition paradigms. Trends Cogn.Sci. this issue7. Brascamp, J. et al. (2015) Negligible fronto-parietalBOLD activity accompanying unreportable switches inbistable perception. Nat. Neurosci. 18, 1672–1678

Finessing the Bored Monkey Problem

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Finessing the Bored Monkey Problem

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