Table 2 Key features of consciousness (= multimodal situational survey) in healthy subjects and in patients with Disorders of Consciousness
Feature | Description in healthy subjects | Description in patients with DoCs |
|---|---|---|
Qualitative richness | Conscious experience is qualified by distinct sensory modalities and submodalities | Conscious contents (if any) might be limited in both sensory modalities and submodalities. They can be evaluated based on brain damage and residual behaviours (e.g. sniffing for smelling) |
Situatedness | Conscious experience is specified by the subject´s spatiotemporal condition | Spatiotemporal framing, as well as bodily experience, might be changeable and discontinuous/fragmented |
Intentionality | Consciousness is about something other than its neuronal underpinnings | Possible residual consciousness might be still intentional but less egocentric and more allocentric. Arguably decoding from the visual cortical system may indicate what residual visual experience is about |
Integration | The components of the conscious experience are perceived as a unified whole | The elements of a scene might be perceived independently or at different levels of detail |
Dynamics and stability | Conscious experiences include both dynamic changes and short-term stabilization | Being the anticorrelation between DMN and DAT compromised, residual conscious processing might be very unstable without any capacity for stabilization. Also the updating (dynamics) of conscious experience can be compromised |