Lucia Melloni
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics / NYU Grossman School of Medicine
Integrated information Consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information
Lucia Melloni is Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany, and Research Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology at New York University Grossman School of Medicine. She serves as President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC).
Melloni is the project lead of the Cogitate Consortium, a landmark open-science adversarial collaboration funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. The consortium unites leading neuroscientists across international laboratories using high-density EEG, MEG, fMRI, and invasive intracranial electrophysiology (iEEG) to test mutually exclusive empirical predictions formulated by Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNW).
Melloni’s leadership has transformed consciousness research into a standardized, adversarial empirical science, establishing definitive protocols for verifying the neural correlates of conscious perception and testing theoretical claims against rigorous multi-modal brain data.
Known for. Lead of the Cogitate Consortium open science adversarial collaboration (IIT vs. GNW), President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC 2026)
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
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- Anton ArkhipovAllen Institute for Brain ScienceLarge-scale neural simulation, biophysically detailed cortical models, AIBRAIN program, State of Brain Emulation Report 2025
- Nihat AyHamburg University of Technology; external professor, Santa Fe Institute; honorary professor, Leipzig UniversityInformation geometry and information-theoretic measures of complexity and causal integration
- Bernard J. BaarsThe Neurosciences InstituteGlobal Workspace Theory (GWT), cognitive architecture of conscious access, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (1988), In the Theater of Consciousness (1997)
- Adam B. BarrettSussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of SussexContinuous field formulations of Integrated Information Theory, Measure-theoretic Phi, practical complexity measures, Granger causality
Lucia Melloni is listed with the other integrated information theorists, who hold that consciousness is intrinsic causal power, measured as integrated information. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.