Fig. 10: Simulating blindsight.

Lesions to V1 can cause the condition known as blindsight, in which patients have the subjective sensation of blindness despite preserved visual capacity. This pattern can be formalized as a combination of preserved type-1 sensitivity (d'), low visual confidence, and low type-2 sensitivity (meta-d'). a Lesions to V1 were simulated in the model by scaling activations in the first layer of the trained network by a factor of 0.01. This resulted in a sharp reduction in meta-d' despite relatively preserved d'. b Confidence ratings were significantly lower following simulated lesions, and the distribution of confidence ratings showed a nearly complete overlap for correct and incorrect trials, consistent with meta-d' ≈ 0. All results reflect an average over 100 trained networks ± the standard error of the mean. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.