Brain regions encoded unseen faces strongly enough to reconstruct them

A preprint found that brain regions can represent a stimulus strongly even when the person cannot consciously see it. During binocular rivalry, inferotemporal and prefrontal regions alternated between conscious and suppressed representations roughly every 60 milliseconds, but the researchers later clarified that this does not establish a fixed frame rate for consciousness.

• Suppressed activity remained strong deep in the brain
• Neural signals were detailed enough to reconstruct a high-dimensional face

That gives researchers matched neural signatures for an accessible stimulus and an inaccessible one, making the process of conscious access easier to test. The result covers selected brain regions, not the whole brain.