Abstract Conscious awareness of the world fluctuates, either through variation in how vividly we perceive the environment, or when our attentional focus shifts away from information in the external environment towards information that we generate via imagination. Our study combined individual differences in experience sampling, psychophysical reports of perception and neuroimaging descriptions of structural connectivity to better understand these changes in conscious awareness. In particular, we examined (i) whether aspects of ongoing thought—indexed via multi-dimensional experience sampling during a sustained attention task—are associated with the white matter fibre organization of the cortex as reflected by their relative degree of anisotropic diffusion and (ii) whether these neurocognitive descriptions of ongoing experience are related to a more constrained measure of visual consciousness through analysis of bistable perception during binocular rivalry. Individuals with greater fractional anisotropy in right hemisphere white matter regions involving the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus, the superior longitudinal fasciculus and the cortico-spinal tract, described their ongoing thoughts as lacking external details. Subsequent analysis indicated that the combination of low fractional anisotropy in these right hemisphere regions, with reports of thoughts with high levels of external details, was associated with the shortest periods of dominance during binocular rivalry. Since variation in binocular rivalry reflects differences between bottom-up and top-down influences on vision, our study suggests that reports of ongoing thoughts with vivid external details may occur when conscious precedence is given to bottom-up representation of perceptual information.

中文翻译：

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由于树木而错过了森林：双眼竞争中较慢的交替与持续进行思考时的视觉细节水平较低相关

摘要人们对世界的意识波动，这可能是因为我们对环境的感知方式发生了变化，或者当我们的注意力从外部环境中的信息转移到了我们通过想象产生的信息上时。我们的研究结合了经验采样，感知的心理生理报告以及结构连接的神经影像描述中的个体差异，以更好地了解意识意识的这些变化。特别是，我们研究了（i）持续思考的各个方面（通过在持续关注任务过程中进行的多维经验采样编制的索引）是否与皮质的白质纤维组织相关联，如它们的各向异性扩散程度所反映的；以及（ii）这些通过对双眼竞争中双稳态感知的分析，对正在进行的体验的神经认知描述与视觉意识的更受限度量有关。在右半球白质区域涉及额额枕下筋膜，上纵向筋膜和皮质脊髓束的部分各向异性较大的个体，其正在进行的想法缺乏外部细节。随后的分析表明，在这些右半球区域中，低比例各向异性的组合，带有高水平外部细节的思想的报道与双目竞争中最短的支配期有关。由于双眼竞争的差异反映了自下而上和自上而下对视觉的影响之间的差异，因此我们的研究表明，当自觉优先考虑自下而上的感知信息表示时，可能会出现带有生动外部细节的正在进行的思想的报告。