Cortical layer-5 pyramidal neurons and conscious interpretation of perceptual ambiguity

What is it about?

There appears to be a fundamental difference between the two ways of how an object becomes perceptually experienced. One occurs when pre-conscious object-specifying sensory data processing crosses a certain threshold so that sensory constituents of object depiction become consciously experienced. The other occurs when the already consciously experienced sensory features of the object become interpreted as belonging to a certain visual object category. Surprisingly, experimental facts about neural markers of conscious access gathered so far do not allow us to distinguish mechanisms responsible for these two varieties. The newly emerging paradigm of cellular psychology with its focus on cortical deep-layer pyramidal neurons (in their interaction with sub-cortical mechanisms) offers an explanatory mechanism for this impasse. Context-sensitive multi-compartment layer-5 neurons integrate specific sensory content of certain perceptual objects and also contextual information capable of selecting the cognitive context where this specific sensory content could belong. Depending on the context, the one and the same UNCHANGING SENSORY experience of an ambiguous object can be therefore associated with CHANGING COGNITIVE context-dependent awareness of what is the category the object belongs to.

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Why is it important?

This approach to conscious perception and cognition capitalizing on the new neuro-biological knowledge of cellular mechanisms allows to move the science of consciousness to a more detailed, more precise understanding of the underlying mechanisms of the human mind.

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