Awareness of number in children with severe and profound learning difficulties: three exploratory case studies

This paper reports on exploratory work investigating how children with severe and profound learning difficulties register an awareness of small quantities and how they might use this information to inform their understanding. It draws on studies of typically developing children and investigates their application to pupils whose response to conventional mathematical tasks are often limited because they lack relevance and interest. The responses of the three pupils to individualized learning contexts mirror the progression suggested in the literature, namely from awareness of number to simple actions using number cues to problem-solving behaviour

Preserved emotional awareness of pain in a patient with extensive bilateral damage to the insula, anterior cingulate, and amygdala

Functional neuroimaging investigations of pain have discovered a reliable pattern of activation within limbic regions of a putative "pain matrix" that has been theorized to reflect the affective dimension of pain. To test this theory, we evaluated the experience of pain in a rare neurological patient with extensive bilateral lesions encompassing core limbic structures of the pain matrix, including the insula, anterior cingulate, and amygdala. Despite widespread damage to these regions, the patient's expression and experience of pain was intact, and at times excessive in nature. This finding was consistent across multiple pain measures including self-report, facial expression, vocalization, withdrawal reaction, and autonomic response. These results challenge the notion of a "pain matrix" and provide direct evidence that the insula, anterior cingulate, and amygdala are not necessary for feeling the suffering inherent to pain. The patient's heightened degree of pain affect further suggests that these regions may be more important for the regulation of pain rather than providing the decisive substrate for pain's conscious experience.

Are visual threats prioritized without awareness? A critical review and meta analysis involving 3 behavioral paradigms and 2696 observers

Given capacity limits, only a subset of stimuli 1 give rise to a conscious percept. Neurocognitive models suggest that humans have evolved mechanisms that operate without awareness and prioritize threatening stimuli over neutral stimuli in subsequent perception. In this meta analysis, we review evidence for this ‘standard hypothesis’ emanating from three widely used, but rather different experimental paradigms that have been used to manipulate awareness. We found a small pooled threat-bias effect in the masked visual probe paradigm, a medium effect in the binocular rivalry paradigm and highly inconsistent effects in the breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm. Substantial heterogeneity was explained by the stimulus type: the only threat stimuli that were robustly prioritized across all three paradigms were fearful faces. Meta regression revealed that anxiety may modulate threat biases, but only under specific presentation conditions. We also found that insufficiently rigorous awareness measures, inadequate control of response biases and low level confounds may undermine claims of genuine unconscious threat processing. Considering the data together, we suggest that uncritical acceptance of the standard hypothesis is premature: current behavioral evidence for threat-sensitive visual processing that operates without awareness is weak.