Andres Canales-JohnsonUniversity of Cambridge | Cam · MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
Andres Canales-Johnson
About
90
Publications
39,627
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,629
Citations
Introduction
I'm studying conscious access during transitions of (un)consciousness in the Consciousness and Sleep Lab with Dr. Tristan Bekinschtein. We evaluate conscious access using behavioral and brain activity measures such as electroencephalography (EEG) and it's combination with functional magnetic resonance imaging (EEG-fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (EEG-TMS).
Additional affiliations
January 2011 - present
Publications
Publications (90)
Interoception, the perception of our body internal signals, plays a key role in maintaining homeostasis and guiding our behavior. Sometimes, we become aware of our body signals and use them in planning and strategic thinking. Here, we show behavioral and neural dissociations between learning to follow one’s own heartbeat and metacognitive awareness...
In the study of consciousness, neurophenomenology was originally established as a novel research program attempting to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable method-ologies in psychology: qualitative and quantitative methods. Its potential relies on Francisco Varela's idea of reciprocal constraints, in which first-person accounts and neurophysiolo...
The transition from a relaxed to a drowsy state of mind is often accompanied by hypnagogic experiences: most commonly, perceptual imagery, but also linguistic intrusions, i.e., the sudden emergence of unpredictable anomalies in the stream of inner speech. This study has sought to describe the contents of such intrusions, to verify their association...
Theoretical advances in the science of consciousness have proposed that it is concomitant with balanced cortical integration and differentiation, enabled by efficient networks of information transfer across multiple scales. Here, we apply graph theory to compare key signatures of such networks in high-density electroencephalographic data from 32 pa...
Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder (DD) typically manifests as a disruption of body self-awareness. Interoception -defined as the cognitive processing of body signals- has been extensively considered as a key processing for body self-awareness. In consequence, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether there are systematic differenc...
Human vision can detect a single photon, but the minimal exposure required to extract meaning from stimulation remains unknown. This requirement cannot be characterised by stimulus energy, because the system is differentially sensitive to attributes defined by configuration rather than physical amplitude. Determining minimal exposure durations requ...
Human vision can detect a single photon, but the minimal exposure required to extract meaning from stimulation remains unknown. This requirement cannot be characterised by stimulus energy, because the system is differentially sensitive to attributes defined by configuration rather than physical amplitude. Determining minimal exposure durations requ...
Throughout the day, humans show natural fluctuations in arousal that impact cognitive function. To study the behavioural dynamics of cognitive control during high and low arousal states, healthy participants performed an auditory conflict task during high‐intensity physical exercise ( N = 39) or drowsiness ( N = 33). In line with the pre‐registered...
Important efforts have been made to describe the neural and cognitive features of healthy and clinical populations. However, the neural and cognitive features of socially vulnerable individuals remain largely unexplored, despite their proneness to developing neurocognitive disorders. Socially vulnerable individuals can be characterised as socially...
A relevant question concerning inter-areal communication in the cortex is whether these interactions are synergistic. Synergy refers to the complementary effect of multiple brain signals conveying more information than the sum of each isolated signal. Redundancy, on the other hand, refers to the common information shared between brain signals. Here...
Important efforts have been made to describe the neural and cognitive features of healthy and clinical populations. However, the neural and cognitive features of socially vulnerable individuals remain largely unexplored, despite their proneness to developing neurocognitive disorders. Socially vulnerable individuals can be characterised as socially...
Breathwork is a term for an understudied school of practices that involve the intentional modulation of respiration to induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC). We map here the neural dynamics of mental content during breathwork, using a neurophenomenological approach by combining Temporal Experience Tracing, a quantitative phenomenological m...
Physiological activation fluctuates throughout the day. Previous studies have shown that during periods of reduced activation, cognitive control remains resilient due to neural compensatory mechanisms. In this study, we investigate the effects of high physiological activation on both behavioural and neural markers of cognitive control. We hypothesi...
Important efforts have been made to describe the neural and cognitive features of healthy and clinical populations. However, the neural and cognitive features of socially vulnerable individuals remain largely unexplored, despite their proneness to developing neurocognitive disorders. Socially vulnerable individuals can be characterised as socially...
Neural connectivity analysis is often performed on continuous data that has been discretized into temporal windows of a fixed length. However, the selection of an optimal window length is non-trivial, and depends on the properties of the connectivity metric being used as well as the effects of interest within the data (e.g. developmental or inter-b...
In the search for the neural basis of conscious experience, perception and the cognitive processes associated with reporting perception are typically confounded as neural activity is recorded while participants explicitly report what they experience. Here, we present a novel way to disentangle perception from report using eye movement analysis tech...
Throughout the day, humans show natural fluctuations in arousal that impact cognitive function. To study the behavioural dynamics of cognitive control during high and low arousal states, healthy participants performed an auditory conflict task during high-intensity physical exercise (N = 39) or drowsiness (N = 33). In line with the pre-registered h...
What mechanisms underlie flexible inter-areal communication in the cortex? We consider four mechanisms for temporal coordination and their contributions to communication: (1) Oscillatory synchronization (communication-through-coherence); (2) communication-through-resonance; (3) non-linear integration; and (4) linear signal transmission (coherence-t...
Usually considered as internal representations of self-concepts, the individual-self and the collective-self have been primarily studied in social and personality psychology while the experimental and theoretical advances of the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms of these self-representations are poorly understood. Two competing hypotheses...
An important question concerning inter-areal communication in the cortex is whether these interactions are synergistic, i.e. convey information beyond what can be performed by isolated signals. Here, we dissociated cortical interactions sharing common information from those encoding complementary information during prediction error processing. To t...
Focusing internally on movement control or bodily sensations is frequently shown to disrupt the effectiveness and efficiency of motor control when compared to focusing externally on the outcome of movement. Whilst the behavioral consequences of these attentional strategies are well-documented, it is unclear how they are explained at the corticomusc...
Cortical areas are reciprocally coupled via feedforward (FF) and feedback (FB) connections that have distinct laminar profiles. Recurrent interactions between FF and FB streams may underlie context-dependent, flexible processing of sensory stimuli and the formation of predictions. Hierarchical predictive coding theories postulate that the communica...
The human visual system is capable of detecting extremely small light signals, as little as one single photon. But what is the visual system’s minimal exposure threshold to detect meaningful stimuli? Due to hardware limitations, studies examining fast visual processing typically present stimuli for suprathreshold durations and disrupt processing wi...
Hypnotic suggestions can produce a broad range of perceptual experiences, including hallucinations. Visual hypnotic hallucinations differ in many ways from regular mental images. For example, they are usually experienced as automatic, vivid, and real images, typically compromising the sense of reality. While both hypnotic hallucination and mental i...
The human visual system is capable of detecting extremely small light signals, as little as one single photon. But what is the visual system’s minimal exposure threshold to detect meaningful stimuli? Due to hardware limitations, studies examining fast visual processing typically present stimuli for suprathreshold durations and disrupt processing wi...
The contents of consciousness are complex and dynamic and are embedded in perception and cognition. The study of consciousness and subjective experience has been central to philosophy for centuries. However, despite its relevance for understanding cognition and behaviour, the empirical study of consciousness is relatively new, embroiled by the seem...
Subjective experiences are hard to capture quantitatively without losing depth and nuance. Subjective report analyses are time-consuming, with their interpretation contested. We describe Temporal Experience Tracing, a method that captures relevant aspects of the unified conscious experience over a continuous period of time. This continuous multidim...
There is increasing evidence that level of consciousness can be captured by neural informational complexity: for instance, complexity, as measured by the Lempel Ziv (LZ) compression algorithm, decreases during anesthesia and non‐rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep in humans and rats, when compared to LZ in awake and REM sleep. In contrast, LZ is higher...
In recent years, a growing corpus of research has been conducted utilizing a variety of behavioral and neurophysiological methodologies to investigate the relationship of emotion and cognition, yielding unique insights into fundamental concerns about the human mind and mental disease. Electroencephalography (EEG) has been utilized to investigate ho...
The contents of consciousness are complex and dynamic and are embedded in perception and cognition. The study of consciousness and subjective experience has been central to philosophy for centuries. However, despite its relevance for understanding cognition and behaviour, the empirical study of consciousness is relatively new, embroiled by the seem...
In the search for the neural basis of conscious experience, perception and its cognitive consequences are typically confounded as neural activity is recorded while participants explicitly report what they experience. Here we present a novel way to disentangle perception from report using eye-movement analysis techniques based on convolutional neura...
Detection of statistical irregularities, measured as a prediction error response, is fundamental to the perceptual monitoring of the environment. We studied whether prediction error response is associated with neural oscillations or asynchronous broadband activity. Electrocorticography was conducted in three male monkeys, who passively listened to...
The human visual system is capable of detecting extremely small light signals, as little as one single photon. But what is the visual system’s minimal exposure threshold to detect
meaningful stimuli? Due to hardware limitations, studies examining fast visual processing
typically present stimuli for suprathreshold durations and disrupt processing wi...
There is increasing evidence that level of consciousness can be captured by neural informational complexity: for instance, complexity, as measured by the Lempel Ziv (LZ) compression algorithm, decreases during anesthesia and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep in humans and rats, when compared to LZ in awake and REM sleep. In contrast, LZ is higher...
Conflict detection in sensory input is central to adaptive human behavior. Perhaps unsurprisingly, past research has shown that conflict may even be detected in absence of conflict awareness, suggesting that conflict detection is an automatic process that does not require attention. To test the possibility of conflict processing in the absence of a...
Hypnotic suggestions can produce a broad range of perceptual experiences, including hallucinations. Visual hypnotic hallucinations differ in many ways from regular mental images. For example, they are usually experienced as automatic, vivid, and real images, typically compromising the sense of reality. While both hypnotic hallucination and mental i...
Abstract: Faces are believed to be processed quickly, efficiently, and perhaps unconsciously. Previous studies have suggested a processing advantage for upright over inverted faces, and for emotional over neutral faces. If so, would orientation and emotion affect the minimal exposure duration required for a face to be discriminated? Due to hardware...
Hypnotic suggestions can produce a broad range of perceptual experiences, including hallucinations. Visual hypnotic hallucinations differ in many ways from regular mental images. For example, they are usually experienced as automatic, vivid, and real images, typically compromising the sense of reality. While both hypnotic hallucination and mental i...
Mental imagery is the process through which we retrieve and recombine information from our memory to elicit the subjective impression of "seeing with the mind's eye". In the social domain, we imagine other individuals while recalling our encounters with them or modelling alternative social interactions in future. Many studies using imaging and neur...
Mental imagery is the process through which we retrieve and recombine information from our memory to elicit the subjective impression of “seeing with the mind’s eye”. In the social domain, we imagine other individuals while recalling our encounters with them or modelling alternative social interactions in future. Many studies using imaging and neur...
Conflict detection in sensory input is central to adaptive human behavior. Perhaps unsurprisingly, past research has shown that conflict may be detected even in the absence of conflict awareness, suggesting that conflict detection is a fully automatic process that does not require attention. Across six behavioral tasks, we manipulated task relevanc...
Humans' remarkable capacity to flexibly adapt their behaviour based on rapid situational changes is termed cognitive control. Intuitively, cognitive control is thought to be affected by the state of alertness, for example, when drowsy we feel less capable of adequately implementing effortful cognitive tasks. Although scientific investigations have...
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been widely used in human cognitive neuroscience to examine the causal role of distinct cortical areas in perceptual, cognitive and motor functions. However, it is widely acknowledged that the effects of focal cortical stimulation can vary substantially between participants and even from trial to trial wi...
Mapping the reports of awareness and its neural underpinnings is instrumental to understand the limits of human perception. The capacity to become aware of objects in the world may be studied by suppressing faint target stimuli with strong masking stimuli, or – alternatively – by manipulating the level of wakefulness from full alertness to mild dro...
At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguish a variety of objects within it. This phenomenon instantiates two properties of conscious perception: integration and differentiation. Integration is the property of experiencing a collection of objects as a unitary percept and differentiation is the p...
At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguish a variety of objects within it. This phenomenon instantiates two properties of conscious perception: integration and differentiation. Integration to experience a collection of objects as a unitary percept, and differentiation to experience these objec...
Humans’ remarkable capacity to flexibly adapt their behaviour based on rapid situational changes is termed cognitive control. Intuitively, cognitive control is thought to be affected by the state of alertness, for example, when drowsy we feel less capable of adequately implementing effortful cognitive tasks. Although scientific investigations have...
Recent evidence indicates that humans can learn entirely new information during sleep. To elucidate the neural dynamics underlying sleep-learning, we investigated brain activity during auditory-olfactory discriminatory associative learning in human sleep. We found that learning-related delta and sigma neural changes are involved in early acquisitio...
Detection of statistical irregularities, measured as a prediction error response, is fundamental to the perceptual monitoring of the environment. We studied whether prediction error response is associated with neural oscillations or asynchronous broadband activity. Electrocorticography (ECoG) was carried out in three male monkeys, who passively lis...
Faces and their emotional expressions are widely believed to be processed quickly, efficiently, and perhaps even unconsciously. What is the minimal exposure duration required for a face image to be visually discriminated? Is there a processing advantage for upright over inverted faces and for emotional over non-emotional faces? Due to hardware limi...
Faces are widely believed to be processed quickly, efficiently, and perhaps even unconsciously, due to their importance in human life. What is the minimal exposure duration required for a face image to reach awareness? Is there a processing advantage (reflected in awareness at briefer presentation times) for upright over inverted faces and for emot...
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been widely used in human cognitive neuroscience to examine the causal role of distinct cortical areas in perceptual, cognitive and motor functions. However, it is widely acknowledged that the effects of focal cortical stimulation on behaviour can vary substantially between participants and even from tria...
The weighted Phase Lag Index (wPLI) and the weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) represent two robust and widely used methods for MEG/EEG functional connectivity estimation. Interestingly, both methods have been shown to detect relative alterations of brain functional connectivity in conditions associated with changes in the level of conscio...
Mental imagery is the process through which we retrieve and recombine information from our memory to elicit the subjective impression of “seeing with the mind’s eye”. Many studies using imaging and neurophysiological techniques have shown several similarities in brain activity between visual imagery and visual perception. However, currently the dyn...
Cognitive control over conflicting sensory input is central to adaptive human behavior. It might therefore not come as a surprise that past research has shown conflict detection in the absence of conscious awareness. This would suggest that the brain may detect conflict fully automatically, and that it can even occur without paying attention. Contr...
Functional connectivity (FC) estimation methods are extensively used in neuroimaging to measure brain inter-regional interactions. The weighted Phase Lag Index (wPLI) and the weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) represent relatively robust exemplars of spectral (wPLI) and information-theoretic (wSMI) connectivity measures that recently gaine...
The relationship between ongoing brain interoceptive signals and emotional processes has been addressed only indirectly through external stimulus-locked measures. In this study, an internal body trigger (heart evoked potential, HEP) was used to measure ongoing internally triggered signals during emotional states. We employed high-density electroenc...
Interoception is the moment-to-moment sensing of the physiological condition of the body. The multimodal sources of interoception can be classified into two different streams of afferents: an internal pathway of signals arising from core structures (i.e., heart, blood vessels, and bronchi) and an external pathway of body-mapped sensations (i.e., ch...