The ongoing reproducibility crisis in psychology and cognitive neuroscience has sparked increasing calls to re-evaluate and reshape scientific culture and practices. Heeding those calls, we have recently launched the EEGManyPipelines project as a means to assess the robustness of EEG research in naturalistic conditions and experiment with an alternative model of conducting scientific research. One hundred sixty-eight analyst teams, encompassing 396 individual researchers from 37 countries, independently analyzed the same unpublished, representative EEG data set to test the same set of predefined hypotheses and then provided their analysis pipelines and reported outcomes. Here, we lay out how large-scale scientific projects can be set up in a grassroots, community-driven manner without a central organizing laboratory. We explain our recruitment strategy, our guidance for analysts, the eventual outputs of this project, and how it might have a lasting impact on the field.

Our visual system is constantly confronted with more information than it can process. To deal with the limited capacity, attention allows us to enhance relevant information and suppress irrelevant information. Particularly, the suppression of salient irrelevant stimuli has shown to be important as it prevents attention to be captured and thus attentional resources to be wasted. This study aimed at directly connecting failures to suppress distraction with a neural marker of suppression, the distractor positivity (Pd). We measured participants' EEG signal while they performed a visual search task in which they had to report a digit inside a shape target while ignoring distractors, one of which could be a salient color singleton. Reports of target digits served as a behavioral index of enhancement, and reports of color distractor digits served as a behavioral index of failed suppression, each measured against reports of neutral distractor digits serving as a baseline. Participants reported the target identity more often than any distractor identity. The singleton identity was reported least often, suggesting suppression of the singleton below baseline. Suppression of salient stimuli was absent in the beginning and then increased throughout the experiment. When the singleton identity was reported, the Pd was observed in a later time window, suggesting that behavioral errors were preceded by failed suppression. Our results provide evidence for the signal suppression hypothesis that states salient items have to be actively suppressed to avoid attentional capture. Our results also provide direct evidence that the Pd is reflecting such active suppression.

Change blindness—the failure to detect changes in visual scenes—has often been interpreted as a result of impoverished visual information encoding or as a failure to compare the prechange and postchange scene. In the present electroencephalography study, we investigated whether semantic features of prechange and postchange information are processed unconsciously, even when observers are unaware that a change has occurred. We presented scenes composed of natural objects in which one object changed from one presentation to the next. Object changes were either semantically related (e.g., rail car changed to rail) or unrelated (e.g., rail car changed to sausage). Observers were first asked to detect whether any change had occurred and then to judge the semantic relation of the two objects involved in the change. We found a semantic mismatch ERP effect, that is, a more negative-going ERP for semantically unrelated compared to related changes, originating from a cortical network including the left middle temporal gyrus and occipital cortex and resembling the N400 effect, albeit at longer latencies. Importantly, this semantic mismatch effect persisted even when observers were unaware of the change and the semantic relationship of prechange and postchange object. This finding implies that change blindness does not preclude the encoding of the prechange and postchange objects' identities and possibly even the comparison of their semantic content. Thus, change blindness cannot be interpreted as resulting from impoverished or volatile visual representations or as a failure to process the prechange and postchange object. Instead, change detection appears to be limited at a later, postperceptual stage.

The ongoing state of the brain radically affects how it processes sensory information. How does this ongoing brain activity interact with the processing of external stimuli? Spontaneous oscillations in the alpha range are thought to inhibit sensory processing, but little is known about the psychophysical mechanisms of this inhibition. We recorded ongoing brain activity with EEG while human observers performed a visual detection task with stimuli of different contrast intensities. To move beyond qualitative description, we formally compared psychometric functions obtained under different levels of ongoing alpha power and evaluated the inhibitory effect of ongoing alpha oscillations in terms of contrast or response gain models. This procedure opens the way to understanding the actual functional mechanisms by which ongoing brain activity affects visual performance. We found that strong prestimulus occipital alpha oscillations—but not more anterior mu oscillations—reduce performance most strongly for stimuli of the highest intensities tested. This inhibitory effect is best explained by a divisive reduction of response gain. Ongoing occipital alpha oscillations thus reflect changes in the visual system's input/output transformation that are independent of the sensory input to the system. They selectively scale the system's response, rather than change its sensitivity to sensory information.

What is the observer's conscious experience in a change blindness task? Overgaard, Jensen, and Sandberg argue that subjective measures are required for any conclusions about conscious experience. We will lay out how the choice of subjective or objective measures depends on the given research question and that objective measures allow inferences on experience given plausible assumptions regarding the relation between task performance and experience.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that observers often fail to notice large changes in visual scenes, a phenomenon known as change blindness. Some experiments have suggested that phenomenological experience in change blindness experiments is more diverse than the common distinction between change detection and change blindness allows to resolve. Recently, it has been debated whether changes in visual scenes can be detected (“sensed”) without a corresponding perception of the changing object (“seeing”) and whether these phenomena build on fundamentally different perceptual processes. The present study investigated whether phenomenologically different perceptual processes such as sensing and seeing rely on different or similar neural processes. We studied ERP effects of visual change processing (as compared to change blindness) when observers merely detected the presence of a change (“sensing”) and when they identified the changing object in addition to detection (“seeing”). Although the visual awareness negativity (VAN)/selection negativity was similar for detection with and without identification, a change-related positivity and the N2pc contralateral to changes were found exclusively when the change was fully identified. This finding indicates that change identification requires perceptual and neural processes that are not involved in mere detection. In a second experiment, we demonstrated that the VAN and N2pc effects are similar to effects of selective attention in a visual search task. By contrast, the change-related positivity was specific for conscious processing of visual changes. The results suggest that changes can be detected (“sensed”) without perception of the changing object. Furthermore, sensing and seeing seem to rely on different neural processes and seem to constitute different types of visual perception. These findings bear implications for how different categories of visual awareness are related to different stages in visual processing.