Neural signature of the conscious processing of auditory regularities

Can conscious processing be inferred from neurophysiological measurements? Some models stipulate that the active maintenance of perceptual representations across time requires consciousness. Capitalizing on this assumption, we designed an auditory paradigm that evaluates cerebral responses to violations of temporal regularities that are either local in time or global across several seconds. Local violations led to an early response in auditory cortex, independent of attention or the presence of a concurrent visual task, whereas global violations led to a late and spatially distributed response that was only present when subjects were attentive and aware of the violations. We could detect the global effect in…