Jonathan Huntley
University of Exeter; Division of Psychiatry, University College London
AI welfare Whatever the metaphysics, uncertainty already creates obligations
Jonathan Huntley is a clinician-researcher at the University of Exeter and University College London who studies awareness in advanced dementia. His working problem is that severe Alzheimer’s disease removes the verbal channel that almost every consciousness assessment depends on, so awareness must be read from physiology instead.
His August 2026 medRxiv preprint “A multimodal investigation of perceptual awareness in Alzheimer’s disease” (doi:10.64898/2026.08.27.26356661), with Benjy Barnett, Daniel Bor, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Lorina Naci, Stephen Fleming, Adrian M. Owen, Robert Howard and colleagues, ran a visual masking paradigm recording the visual awareness negativity and late positive EEG components alongside fMRI fronto-parietal activation, in healthy controls and in mild-moderate and severe Alzheimer’s patients. Awareness markers were present in controls, significantly reduced in mild-moderate disease, and largely absent in severely affected, minimally responsive patients.
This is the clinical face of the measurement problem that consciousness science and AI consciousness assessment share. Huntley’s work treats awareness as a measurable physiological signature rather than a report, which is the same move any consciousness meter for a non-verbal system, human or artificial, has to make.
Known for. Awareness assessment in severe Alzheimer's disease, multimodal EEG-fMRI measures of perceptual awareness
Coverage on this site
- Perceptual Awareness in Alzheimer Disease Measured by EEG and fMRI in Huntley and Mediano's 2026 Study October 2026
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Jonathan Huntley is listed with the other welfare and moral status researchers, who hold that whatever the metaphysics, uncertainty already creates obligations. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.