Project: Conscious Perception and State
FIM Authors:
Authors:
- Sharif Kronemer
- Victoria Gobo
- Shruti Japee
- Eli Merriam
- Diana Burk
- Benjamin Osborne
- Peter Bandettini
- Tina Liu
Cerebral blindness is caused by damage to the primary visual pathway. Some people with cerebralblindness retain degraded vision and non-visual sensations and can perform visually guided behaviorswithin their blind visual field. These cases raise questions about visual conscious perception andresidual neural processing in cerebral blindness. A major challenge in this research is that subjectivereporting on experiences in the blind field can be unreliable. Alternatively, eye metrics offer a promisingobjective marker of conscious awareness, conscious content, and brain activity. In this study, werecorded visual stimulus-evoked pupil size, blink, and microsaccade responses in neurotypicalparticipants and both the sighted and blind fields of cerebrally blind participants. For most patients, wefound that eye metrics inferred conscious awareness in the blind field. Also, pupil size responded toboth real and illusory stimulus luminance in the sighted field but not in the blind field. Furthermore, eyemetrics were linked to visual stimulus-evoked occipital cortical field potentials in the blind field,suggesting residual cortical processing. These findings support eye metrics as an indicator of visualconscious perception and neural processing in cerebral blindness, with potential applications fortracking vision recovery following damage to the primary visual pathway.
Data
Code
Journal: Communications Biology
Volume: 8
URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08945-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08945-5