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Several influential theories of consciousness attempt to explain how, when and where conscious perception arises in the brain. It is generally accepted that the transition to conscious perception requires feedback from higher level regions. However, the extent of this feedback is still debated. One theory holds that the transition to conscious perception requires feedback from frontoparietal regions (the Global Neuronal Workspace theory; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001), whereas the other maintains that feedback within sensory regions is sufficient to enable conscious perception (the Local Recurrence Theory; Lamme, 2006). Here, we combined a challenging discrimination task with EEG decoding techniques to arbitrate between these competing models of consciousness. Participants discriminated at-threshold masked face vs house stimuli and reported confidence in their discrimination performance. A classifier was …