Scientific methods - Consciousness Research

Goran Kardum

News about consciousness research!

Methods of measuring consciousness

Methods of measuring consciousness are often divided into two classes - objective and subjective (Seth et al., 2008).

  • Objective measures look at behaviour or other observable characteristics (e.g. fMRI).

  • An example of this is perception-based testing, in which a subject is presented with a stimulus and behavioural measures are used to determine whether it has been consciously perceived

Assessment of consciousness

  • The tool we use to assess the level of consciousness is the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS)
  • Used to objectively describe the extent of impaired consciousness in all types of acute medical and trauma patients
  • Experts at the University of Glasgow in Scotland developed the GCS in 1974.

Disorders of concsiousness

Disorders of consciousness

  • Patients with alterations in level of consciousness are among the most difficult to assess (Hill et al., 2023)
  • altered level of consciousness
  • describes the neurological assessment

Awareness consciousness?

Many of the perceptual and cognitive processes in the human brain occur without ‘consciousness’ (Dehaene et al., 2017)

  • Masking tests present a stimulus in such a way usually with another stimulus immediately before and after
  • For example, a target picture (such as a picture of a face) is presented for a short period, but immediately preceded and succeeded by a picture with a repeated geometric pattern (Ginsburg and Jablonka 2019).

Direct vs. indirect measures

  • Consciousness cannot be directly observed or measured by any research instruments.
  • Consciousness has many objective but indirect effects that can be measured or recorded.
  • Measurements of consciousness depend on the behavioral expressions of consciousness.

Data collection

  • The data produced by descriptive introspection often comes in the form of subjective verbal reports.
  • Content analysis helps to describe the contents of dreaming
  • Memory is often inaccurate, biased, and distorted.

How to measure scientifically

  • The results of systematic observations are called “data”
  • Qualitative features is invisible to physical research instruments.
  • Consciousness and qualia reveal themselves only to one privileged observer: the subject whose consciousness.
  • Because of the elusive subjective nature of consciousness, many scientists still treat it with suspicion.
  • But - it cannot be totally impossible to make systematic observations of subjective conscious experiences.

Consciousness vs. “hard science”

  • There are lots of phenomena in the hard sciences that can never be directly observed.
  • It is impossible to see an electron or any other sub-atomic peaces of physical evidence.
  • Physical sciences take very seriously the idea that all those things are real and exist somewhere at some point in time in our universe

Consciousness vs. “hard science”

  • Scientists can collect data that describe the subjective conscious experiences underlying the directly observable effects.
  • These data then can be used to build models and theories of consciousness.
  • Consciousness is simply the invisible but real “dark energy of the brain” (Revonsuo, 2017).

How to measure?

  • Psychologists are much more comfortable calling their methods “self-reports”, “subjective verbal reports”, or “behavioral responses” rather than measurements of consciousness
  • Fechner, Wundt, and the classical introspectionists were right about one thing: there is really only one valid methodological approach available: the use of introspection coupled with verbal reports or other behavioral responses that communicate the contents of a subject’s consciousness to the researchers.

How to measure?

  • Titchener and Structuralism: analytic introspection: that type of introspection is not valid for consciousness
  • The type of introspection that can be used in the modern science of consciousness is called descriptive introspection.
  • Its goal is simply to describe, record, and communicate the contents of consciousness exactly as they were experienced by the subject.
  • The clearest example of descriptive introspection as a research methodology can be found in dream research.

Descriptive introspection in modern psychology

  • verbal reports
  • self reports
  • structured interviews
  • inventories, questionnaires, subjective ratings…

Report… what?

  • see
  • hear
  • imagine
  • remember
  • think, feel…

Problems with descriptive introspection

  • The first problem is memory - forgetting.
  • Gap between the occurrence of the dream experience and the reporting of it.
  • Constructive nature of our memory processes, and our tendency to build a coherent narrative story out of the experience.
  • Memory does not work like a video camera: memory involves a constructive process of piecing together bits and pieces of information.
  • Errors in the reconstruction of the experience
  • Human mind - add logical details … fabricate good stories

Problems with descriptive introspection

  • Scientific observation or measurement changing the phenomenon that is to be observed.
  • Example: during the first lab night people dream a lot about the laboratory, which shows that participation in the research has strongly influenced their dream contents.
  • Most people would like to be “good subjects” - biased sample

Scales, questionnaires

  • quantitative measure of different level of consciousness
  • quantiative measure of wakefulness
  • quantitative measure of disorders

NASA-TLX

  • subjective, multidimensional assessment tool that rates perceived workload
  • developed by the Human Performance Group at NASA
  • cited in over 4000 studies

Content analysis of verbal reports

  • It transforms the words in the reports into numbers that reflect the frequencies of various contents of consciousness in the reported (dream) experiences.
  • Most widely used system of content analysis of dreams is called the Hall/Van de Castle system of content analysis

Experience sampling method

  • Experience Sampling Methods (ESM) have been developed to capture and record subjective experiences just as they are happening.
  • They keep the time gap between the experience happening and being reported (the experience-memory gap) as short as possible.
  • Massive forgetfulness: A single moment of consciousness lasts perhaps 1 to 3 seconds; thus, we experience as many as 20,000 to 60,000 conscious moments during one single day of wakefulness!

Experience sampling method

  • Also called ‘beeper’ method
  • The participants carry a beeper (hear the signal — report and record the content of consciousness)
  • Comparing: content during the wakefulness (daydreaming) and content during the night (night dreams)
  • Signal itself disrupts the natural flow of experiences (TOL - thinking out loud)

Retrospective questionnaires

  • List of positive and negative emotions, frequencies during some time sample (last months, year)
  • Could be done on large sample
  • Recostructed memories of past conscious experiences
  • ESM: Experiencing self
  • Retrospective questionnaires: Remebering Self

“Idling” state

  • EEG slow waves are manifest in an unconscious state - superimposed on the alpha and theta waves when our brain is in a low conscious level
  • The so-called “idling” state where the brain is not engaged in the active processing of information (Uusberg et al., 2013)

Sensory deprivation

  • consciousness consists of contents independent of environment
  • assessing, measuring subjective contents
  • eliminate external stimulus
  • resting state

Sensory deprivation

Literature

Dehaene, S., Lau, H., & Kouider, S. (2017). What is consciousness, and could machines have it? Science, 358(6362), 486–492. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan8871
Hill, M., Moreda, M., Navarro, J., & Mulkey, M. (2023). Assessing Patients With Altered Level of Consciousness. Critical Care Nurse, 43(4), 58. https://doi.org/10.4037/ccn2023449
IIT-Concerned, Fleming, S., Frith, C., Goodale, M., Lau, H., LeDoux, J. E., Lee, A. L. F., Michel, M., Owen, A., Peters, M. A. K., & Slagter, H. A. (2023). The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zsr78
Lenharo, M. (2023). Consciousness theory slammed as “pseudoscience” — sparking uproar. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02971-1
Revonsuo, A. (2017). Foundations of consciousness (1st ed.). Routledge.
Seel, R. T., Sherer, M., Whyte, J., Katz, D. I., Giacino, J. T., Rosenbaum, A. M., Hammond, F. M., Kalmar, K., Pape, T. L.-B., Zafonte, R., Biester, R. C., Kaelin, D., Kean, J., & Zasler, N. (2010). Assessment Scales for Disorders of Consciousness: Evidence-Based Recommendations for Clinical Practice and Research. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 91(12), 1795–1813. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apmr.2010.07.218
Seth, A. K., Dienes, Z., Cleeremans, A., Overgaard, M., & Pessoa, L. (2008). Measuring consciousness: Relating behavioural and neurophysiological approaches. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(8), 314–321. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.04.008
Uusberg, A., Uibo, H., Kreegipuu, K., & Allik, J. (2013). EEG alpha and cortical inhibition in affective attention. International Journal of Psychophysiology: Official Journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology, 89(1), 26–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2013.04.020