I just read this very interesting paper out in Cortex taking a novel approach to assessing the role of the prefrontal cortex in consciousness. The interesting idea in the Rowe, Garrido, and Tsuchiaya paper linked to here is the idea of looking at whether there is even enough information being sent to the PFC to account for the contents of consciousness. What they seem to have found was that there is, and it is there whether or not the subjects have to report or are likely aware of the stimulus. They say,

Most strikingly, during Phase 1 (that is, no-report and half of participants unaware of the face stimuli), when prefrontal theories would predict that classification accuracy should fall to chance for the IB participants, we found above-chance classification of face stimuli using the pattern of connectivity between sensory and prefrontal locations regardless of awareness. Further, this classification accuracy remained largely the same, regardless of the presence or absence of reports and awareness (Figure 4). This aspect of the finding is hard to reconcile with any existing theories of consciousness and call for a revised account whereby PFC involvement may be ubiquitous regardless of awareness.

Potentially, a phenomenon that is close to our finding may be “unconscious working memory” (see Soto et al., 2011 and review by Gambarota et al., 2022), which also implies non-conscious prefrontal activity (Soto & Silvanto, 2014) and challenges HOT and GNWT. 

They go on to say why they think this challenges GNWT but do not elaborate on their proposed challenge to higher-order theories. There may or may not be a challenge to a certain implementation of higher-order theories, but there is no challenge to a model like Joe LeDoux’s which sees the lower-order states of which we become aware to be themselves in the prefrontal cortex.

Either way, I think this highlights the importance of talking more about how it is that these psychological level constructs (higher-order representations, etc), get mapped onto the brain.