{"title":"The nature of mind scale (NOMS): Validation of an eight-dimensional scale assessing beliefs about the relationship between mind and matter","authors":"Matthias Forstmann , Pascal Burgmer","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103961","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103961","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We developed and validated the Nature of Mind Scale (NOMS), a 24-item measure assessing lay beliefs about eight distinct philosophical positions on the mind–body relationship. Given the limitations of existing measures and the theoretical diversity of mind–body positions, our goal was to develop a comprehensive yet practical scale that could capture the full range of philosophical stances without reducing them to overly simplified dimensions. Across four studies with 1074 participants, we established the NOMS’s psychometric properties and nomological network. Through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we identified an eight-factor structure representing belief in substance dualism, interactionism, panpsychism, idealism, reductive physicalism, non-reductive physicalism, mystical monism, and neutral monism. Participants most strongly endorsed interactionism, non-reductive physicalism, and mystical monism, while showing the least support for idealism. The scale demonstrated good model fit and strong evidence of measurement invariance across samples. Convergent validity was established through correlations with existing mind–body belief measures. Construct validity was supported by theoretically consistent relationships with religiosity, free will beliefs, cognitive style, personality traits, and afterlife beliefs. The NOMS represents an extension of previous measures of mind–body relations, capturing the multifaceted nature of these beliefs while maintaining sufficient brevity for practical research applications.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"137 ","pages":"Article 103961"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145693625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Synesthesia is associated with distinctive patterns in dream content","authors":"Kyle Napierkowski, Emily Cook","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103959","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103959","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Dreams offer insight into how individual differences shape conscious experience in the absence of external input or task demands. This study examines whether synesthesia is linked to distinct patterns in dream content, suggesting underlying differences in cognitive architecture. Leveraging the statistical power of large-scale, naturalistic data, we analyzed 2,337 dream reports from Reddit, comparing 1,169 reports from self-identified synesthetes with 1,168 matched controls. Semantic embedding models and logistic regression achieved modest classification performance, indicating group-level differences in language use. Topic modeling revealed four themes—digital, interpersonal regret, diverse worlds, and violent conflict—that were significantly more prevalent in synesthete dreams. These results suggest that trait-level cognitive organization, as expressed in synesthetic perception, extends across states of consciousness and shapes the thematic content of dreams. The findings support theoretical accounts of dreaming as continuous with waking cognition and demonstrate how stable neurocognitive traits manifest in unstructured, self-generated thought.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"137 ","pages":"Article 103959"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145497308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A systematic review investigating the link between social cognition and self-awareness in adults","authors":"Mathilde Despres, Elodie Bertrand, Claire Dijoux, Pascale Piolino, Pauline Narme","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103945","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103945","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Social cognition, encompassing the mental processes involved in perceiving, interpreting, and responding to social information, remains a complex domain to model, particularly when considered in relation to self-awareness. As social cognition requires awareness of others, effective self-awareness is often assumed to be crucial for this process. Yet, the role of self-awareness in social cognition is still debated. This systematic review investigates the link between social cognition and self-awareness in adult populations. Following a PRISMA-guided literature search, 8,973 articles were identified, and 192 were selected for full-text screening. Eighty-eight studies met the inclusion criteria, which required quantifying at least one social cognitive process and one self-awareness component and exploring their relationship in healthy adults or patients with neurological or psychiatric conditions. Most studies focused on theory of mind, emotion recognition, and empathy, with insight and metacognition being the primary self-awareness dimensions explored. Theory of mind was most commonly linked to insight, while emotion recognition and empathy were associated with metacognition. Results varied depending on the cognitive processes studied, the population examined, and the methods employed. Notably, stronger correlations were observed when objective measures of self-awareness were used compared to subjective ones. Results point toward a potential bidirectional relationship. However, methodological heterogeneity, including variations in tools, constructs, and statistical analyses, may account for some conflicting findings. This systematic review emphasizes the need for integrative models, refined methodologies, and further research in underrepresented populations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103945"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145364830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Herrick Fung , Medha Shekhar , Kai Xue , Manuel Rausch , Dobromir Rahnev
{"title":"Similarities and differences in the effects of different stimulus manipulations on accuracy and confidence","authors":"Herrick Fung , Medha Shekhar , Kai Xue , Manuel Rausch , Dobromir Rahnev","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103942","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103942","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Visual stimuli can vary in multiple dimensions that affect accuracy and confidence in a perceptual decision-making task. However, previous studies have typically included just one or at most two manipulations, leaving it unclear whether each manipulation has a unique effect on accuracy vs. confidence. Subjects indicated whether a tilted Gabor patch was oriented clockwise or counterclockwise from 45°. We included manipulations of the task-defining feature (tilt offset) and four auxiliary, non-task-defining features (size, duration, spatial frequency, and noise level). We found that the four auxiliary manipulations had fairly similar effects on accuracy and confidence. In contrast, the task-defining tilt offset manipulation stood out by affecting accuracy more strongly than confidence. In addition, tilt offset exhibited a supraadditive interaction with all other manipulations for both accuracy and confidence, whereas all auxiliary manipulations exhibited either no interactions or subadditive interactions with each other. Furthermore, tilt offset was the only manipulation for which confidence in incorrect trials decreased with increasing difficulty, while all auxiliary manipulations exhibited the opposite trend. Overall, our results reveal a noticeable similarity among the effects of all four auxiliary (non-task-defining) manipulations on accuracy and confidence, as well as a prominent difference between them and the task-defining manipulation (tilt offset). These results enable a priori predictions of how novel manipulations would affect accuracy and confidence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103942"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145271327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Modulation of attentional bias by hypnosis: Disentangling the effect of induction and suggestion","authors":"Jeremy Brunel , Stéphanie Mathey , Mathieu Landry , Sandrine Delord","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103948","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103948","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Hypnotic suggestions can modulate unintentional emotional processing. However, the specific contributions of hypnotic induction and suggestion — two central components of the hypnotic procedure — remain unclear. The present study aims to disentangle the effects of hypnotic induction and emotional numbing suggestion on the modulation of attentional bias in two experiments. In Experiment 1, high suggestible individuals (N = 34) performed an online emotional Stroop task in a two-by-two within-subject experimental design in which we crossed hypnotic induction and suggestion. Results show that both the emotional numbing suggestion — whether delivered within or outside the hypnotic context — and the relaxation-based hypnotic induction led to equivalent modulation of attentional bias. Experiment 2 tested the potential confounding effects of demand characteristics and of session repetition on the modulation of attentional bias in low suggestible individuals (N = 38). Results from this second experiment show no significant modulation of attentional bias across the four experimental sessions in this group. Our findings suggest that relaxation-based hypnotic induction and emotional numbing suggestion contribute to the modulation of attentional bias in high suggestible individuals. The results are discussed in line with socio-cognitive perspectives of the hypnotic induction, acting as a relaxation suggestion supporting emotional numbing effects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103948"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145395017","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Art Immersion: Evidence for attention restoration in museums","authors":"Nicola Vasta , Francesco N. Biondi","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103939","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103939","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Navigating crowded urban environments can significantly deplete attentional resources over time, making individuals less attentive and more prone to distractions. While previous research suggests that natural settings can help replenish attentional resources depleted by urban life, little is known about whether similar benefits may arise from tranquil artistic settings, like museums and art exhibitions. Here, we drew on the Attention Restoration Theory to test the restorative effects of a museum visit compared to a walk in an urban environment, using a within-subject pre-post design and a combination of self-reported, behavioral, and physiological measures. Participants completed two computer tasks assessing working memory and attentional control and filled out questionnaires assessing perceived restoration, emotions and stress before and after either a museum visit or an urban walk. Physiological activity was monitored by measuring blink rate and pupil size via an eye-tracker. Results showed greater improvement in attentional control abilities following the museum visit. Additionally, self-reported measures indicated that the museum visit was perceived as being more restorative than the urban walk. Similar improvements were observed for working memory, stress and emotions after both a museum visit and an urban walk. These findings suggest that immersion in artistic environments, like museums, can enhance key attention abilities more effectively than an urban walk, enabling individuals to replenish attention resources and become less distractible afterwards. Our results are encouraging in promoting the beneficial effects of museum visits on attention restoration.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103939"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145318733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The roles of recollection and familiarity in the positive association between dream lucidity and reality monitoring: Evidence from ERPs and EEG","authors":"Moo-Rung Loo, Shih-kuen Cheng","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103947","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103947","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Dream lucidity, the ability to recognize and reflect on one’s dream state, has been linked to heightened memory monitoring. Although individuals with high trait lucidity often rate imagined and perceived events as similarly vivid, they nonetheless perform better in distinguishing memory sources. This study examined whether this advantage reflects greater subjective specificity, the retrieval of more distinct representational details, supported by recollection. Forty-one participants completed a source memory task involving object names that were either imagined or paired with images. During a later recognition test with EEG recording, participants judged each item’s prior occurrence and its source. Trait lucidity was assessed via a multi-day self-report inventory and lucid dream frequency. Participants with higher trait lucidity tended to show greater source memory accuracy, especially for externally perceived items. Event-related potential (ERP) and time–frequency analyses indicated stronger left parietal old/new effects for imagined items, and greater frontal gamma-band power for perceived items. Both effects were positively correlated with trait lucidity (p < 0.05) and source accuracy (p < 0.05). Theta-band activity also predicted source accuracy for both item types. These findings may suggest that high-lucidity individuals engage recollection and familiarity processes to enhance subjective specificity, leading to more precise discrimination between imagined and perceived experiences.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103947"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145410440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perceptual decision making and metacognition in relation to obsessive-compulsive traits","authors":"Anıl Şafak Kaçar , Fuat Balcı","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103944","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103944","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Metacognition is one of the cognitive functions that is shown to be altered in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Studies focusing on metacognitive efficiency have demonstrated disrupted precision of confidence estimates in OCD. However, the data of those studies may have been contaminated by the overestimation of metacognitive efficiency resulting from the use of the staircase method. We used a two-alternative forced-choice task in which difficulty was held constant within each block but varied across blocks throughout the task. No feedback was given to the participants. We collected data from 161 healthy university students with varying degrees of tendencies of OCD symptoms. Contrary to the previous literature, participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had higher metacognitive efficiency. Applying the drift–diffusion modeling approach to the first-order decisions of participants revealed that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency had lower efficiency in integrating perceptual information and less cautious thresholds. Finally, we investigated post-error slowing and found that participants with a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency exhibited limited adaptation of responses to errors and low confidence levels. Overall, our results suggest that having a higher obsessive–compulsive tendency is associated with sufficient metacognitive capacity but also with limited utilization of the metacognitive information for behavioral adaptation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103944"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145309963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Illusory brightness under unconscious processing: Evidence from continuous flash suppression","authors":"Hirotaka Senda, Michael Makoto Martinsen, Hideki Tamura, Shigeki Nakauchi, Tetsuto Minami","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103943","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103943","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Brightness perception can diverge sharply from physical luminance due to contextual cues, but whether such illusory brightness is registered without awareness and whether it speeds entry into awareness remain open questions. We used continuous flash suppression (CFS) to test the glare illusion, which increases perceived brightness without changing central luminance. In Experiment 1, we measured breakthrough time (BT) and found no advantage for glare over physically identical controls, indicating that subjective brightness alone does not reliably hasten access to awareness. In Experiment 2, we selectively suppressed the illusion’s inducer gradients while leaving the central region visible; here the glare condition showed shorter BTs, suggesting that contextual structure can facilitate detection under suppression. In Experiment 3, participants discriminated both physically brighter stimuli and illusory brightness above chance while the stimuli remained suppressed, demonstrating unconscious processing of brightness information. Together, these findings dissociate unconscious encoding from access to awareness: illusory brightness can be processed without consciousness, yet it does not uniformly accelerate emergence into awareness unless the relevant contextual cues are available to the visual system.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103943"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145349755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hong He , Binqian Leng , Jinghong Shi , Xinyue Zhang , Ting Li , Xuemin Zhang
{"title":"Resting state functional connectivity underlining the association between working memory capacity and self-future mind wandering","authors":"Hong He , Binqian Leng , Jinghong Shi , Xinyue Zhang , Ting Li , Xuemin Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103957","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.concog.2025.103957","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Previous research has reported inconsistent findings regarding the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and tendencies for future-oriented mind wandering. To address this, the present study incorporated self-relevant elements into probes to further specify self-relevant, future-oriented (self-future) mind wandering, aiming to clarify its relationship with WMC and explore the functional connectivity mediating this association. Ninety-four participants completed the sustained attention to response task (SART) with thought probes, the operation span (OSPAN) task, and the reading span (RSPAN) task. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data were also collected. The findings demonstrated a significant positive association between WMC and self-future mind wandering. Additionally, functional connectivity between the left lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and the left lateral premotor cortex (LPMC) was positively associated with both WMC and self-future mind wandering. Further analyses revealed that LPFC–LPMC connectivity statistically mediated the relationship between WMC and self-future mind wandering. Conversely, self-future mind wandering also mediated the association between WMC and LPFC–LPMC connectivity. These findings are consistent with the context regulation hypothesis and provide insight into the underlying mechanisms. Specifically, LPFC-LPMC connectivity may link to the integration of motor sequence predictions and anticipated speech and nonverbal communication, whereas the reverse mediation suggests that self-future mind wandering may contribute to shaping neural connectivity associated with executive control.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":51358,"journal":{"name":"Consciousness and Cognition","volume":"136 ","pages":"Article 103957"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2025-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145453989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}