Competition information

Background

Cogitate is an international adversarial collaboration aimed at testing contrasting predictions of two neuroscientific theories of consciousness: Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT). One of these predictions pertains to the interareal connectivity associated with the conscious experience. Specifically, GNWT predicts that a conscious experience requires phase-synchronization in the gamma/beta band between prefrontal cortex (PFC) and category-selective visual areas in the temporal lobe (i.e., FFA for faces and LOC for objects). IIT predicts phase-synchronization between these category-selective areas and low-level visual areas (e.g., V1/V2) (for more details, see Melloni et al. 2023)

To test these hypotheses, neuroimaging (fMRI) and neurophysiological data (MEG, EEG, and ECoG) were acquired from healthy volunteers and patients with pharmaco-resistant focal epilepsy while they were presented with sequences of suprathreshold images from four different categories (i.e., faces, objects, letters, and false fonts) and for three different durations (0.5s, 1s and 1.5s). Participants were asked to search for two infrequent targets prompted at the beginning of each sequence. Depending on the category of these targets, non-target stimuli could belong to the same or a different category, thus resulting in two distinct task-relevance conditions (see Melloni et al. 2023; Cogitate et al. 2023).

The Cogitate Connectivity Challenge will focus on the MEG data sets collected at the Centre for Human Brain Health (University of Birmingham, UK) and at the Centre for MRI Research (Peking University, China) using the TRIUX MEGIN system (for more details on data acquisition, see again (see Melloni et al. 2023; Cogitate et al. 2023).

Aim of the competition

So far, the Cogitate consortium has not been successful in establishing evidence for functional connectivity in MEG regarding gamma/beta band coherence as initially hypothesized. This evidently challenges the specific predictions of those two theories of consciousness, but it also highlights the more general question on whether gamma/beta band coherence is the ideal measure for establishing connectivity in task-based MEG data.

Specific aims

How to submit your entry

The teams are required to submit a written report supplemented by figures and codes (max 8 pages). The report should comprehensively address all the points outlined above. The results should ideally be reported in the format of Figure 4 in Cogitate et al. (2023). The provided code should be replication-friendly and with clear comments. At the end of the challenge, all submitted materials will be made public.

The deadline for first submission is June 14, 2024. We expect a draft of the report + code based on the first half of the participant data.

The deadline for second submission is July 31, 2024. The aim is for the teams to replicate their findings on the second half of the data (according to draft report, which will serve as a pre-registration).