Birthday https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🎂" title="Birthday cake" aria-label="Emoji: Birthday cake"> Preprint klaxon https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="📢" title="Public address loudspeaker" aria-label="Emoji: Public address loudspeaker">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="📢" title="Public address loudspeaker" aria-label="Emoji: Public address loudspeaker">: “A neural representation of invisibility…” with Will Mithen, @HinzeHogendoorn, @NaoTsuchiya, @jeroen_v_boxtel. Of all the papers you’ll see tweeted this week, here’s why you should read this one… 1/6

Our focus of attention and the contents of consciousness frequently overlap. Yet what happens if we break this common correlation? We asked participants to report on the invisibility of 4 individually-calibrated targets, that entrained stimulus-specific neural activity: 2/6

When attending to disappearances, will target-SSVEPs (at f1) also decrease ? This should be the case if SSVEPs track subjective visibility, as has long been assumed. Instead, we show that the more targets disappeared, the stronger their SSVEPs became (!) 3/6

So more likely, SSVEPs track the focus of attention. This is non-trivial here, as Attention & Cons. were also anti-correlated in our paradigm: attending to targets increased their disappearance, and measures of attention increased with invisibility. 4/6

We suggest that SSVEPS have only tracked conscious contents because of the A & C overlap. Now we know this is not always the case: attention can act as a gateway to stimulus-absence, suggesting the neural correlates of attention and perception may also be dissociable. 5/6

Comments/criticisms welcomed. You can find our short preprint here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.20.051334v1,">https://www.biorxiv.org/content/1... and data/code here: https://osf.io/HS7FN/ ">https://osf.io/HS7FN/&qu... . Thanks to @theASSC @TrikBek @smfleming for recent feedback, and @MMConsciousness and @OxACClab for providing the inspo and support ! 6/6