Publications related to Animal consciousness

Ukrainian Literary Imaginaries of Past after 1991: From Substitution to Restoration?

This chapter offers a new view of post-Soviet Ukrainain literary memory as expressed in varous texts, redefining the role of clashing narratives of the past under the divisive political and social conditions of upheavals, crises, and military conflicts. Th ...

Routledge2024

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

Subcortical correlates of consciousness with human single neuron recordings

Olaf Blanke, Fosco Bernasconi, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Michael Eric Anthony Pereira

Subcortical brain structures such as the basal ganglia or the thalamus are involved in regulating motor and cognitive behavior. However, their contribution to perceptual consciousness is still unclear, due to the inherent difficulties of recording subcorti ...

2024

Involvement of prelimbic cortex neurons and related circuits in the acquisition of a cooperative learning by pairs of rats

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Elias Georges Gebara, Ana del Rocio Conde Moro

Social behaviors such as cooperation are crucial for mammals. A deeper knowledge of the neuronal mechanisms underlying cooperation can be beneficial for people suffering from pathologies with impaired social behavior. Our aim was to study the brain activit ...

Springer2024

Bone conduction facilitates self-other voice discrimination

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Oliver Alan Kannape, Pavo Orepic

One's own voice is one of the most important and most frequently heard voices. Although it is the sound we associate most with ourselves, it is perceived as strange when played back in a recording. One of the main reasons is the lack of bone conduction tha ...

2023

Bodily self-consciousness as a framework to link sensory information and self-related components of episodic memory: behavioral, neuroimaging, and clinical evidence

Nathalie Heidi Meyer

The recollection of sensory information and subjective experience related to a personal past event depends on our episodic memory (EM). At the neural level, EM retrieval is linked with the reinstatement of hippocampal activity thought to recollect the sens ...

EPFL2023

The Cerebellum and Cognitive Function: Anatomical Evidence from a Transdiagnostic Sample

Farnaz Delavari, Charles Laidi

Multiple lines of evidence across human functional, lesion, and animal data point to a cerebellar role, in particular of crus I, crus II, and lobule VIIB, in cognitive function. However, a mapping of distinct facets of cognitive function to cerebellar stru ...

Springer2023

Brain mitochondrial diversity and network organization predict anxiety-like behavior in male mice

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez

The brain and behavior are under energetic constraints, limited by mitochondrial energy transformation capacity. However, the mitochondria-behavior relationship has not been systematically studied at a brain-wide scale. Here we examined the association bet ...

Nature Research2023

Radiation Performance of Antennas Implanted in Small Animals for Neuroengineering

Anja Skrivervik, Stéphanie Lacour, Mingxiang Gao, Zvonimir Sipus, Kangling Wu, James Daniel Rosenthal

Wireless data communication could improve the performance and reliability of biomedical implants used in fundamental neuroscience research by removing infection-prone transcutaneous cabling. The small size of common research animals like mice and rodents, ...

IEEE2023

Rituals of art and science to decompart(mentalize) knowledge

Bruno Herbelin

We here explore the potential of rituals in order to more fully comprehend the subjective mechanisms of listening, leading to a broader understanding of phenomenal consciousness (why and how do I know that I am experiencing something?). The originality of ...

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and ISEA lnternational2022

First-person experience cannot rescue causal structure theories from the unfolding argument

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Aaron Schurger

We recently put forward an argument, the Unfolding Argument (UA), that integrated information theory (IIT) and other causal structure theories are either already falsified or unfalsifiable, which provoked significant criticism. It seems that we and the cri ...

Elsevier2022

A new empirical challenge for local theories of consciousness

Adrien Christophe Doerig

Local theories of consciousness state that one is conscious of a feature if it is adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas, given some background conditions. We challenge the core prediction of local theories based on long-lasting postdi ...

2021

Cogno-Vest: A Torso-Worn, Force Display to Experimentally Induce Specific Hallucinations and Related Bodily Sensations

Olaf Blanke, Hannes Bleuler, Jevita Potheegadoo, Oliver Alan Kannape, Masayuki Hara, Kenny Jeanmonod, Atena Fadaeijouybari

Recent advances in virtual reality and robotic technologies have allowed researchers to explore the mechanisms underlying bodily aspects of self-consciousness which are largely attributed to the multisensory and sensorimotor processing of bodily signals (b ...

2022

Wearable Haptics for Somatosensory Perception and Self-consciousness

Atena Fadaeijouybari

Recent research has highlighted the crucial role of the processing of somatosensory signals involving the torso for global aspects of Bodily Self Consciousness (BSC), i.e., the experience of the conscious "I" as embodied and localized within bodily space. ...

EPFL2021

Modulation of Bodily Self-Consciousness by Self and External Touch

Olaf Blanke, Roy Salomon, Masayuki Hara, Noriaki Kanayama

The full body illusion (FBI) is a bodily illusion based on the application of multisensory conflicts inducing changes in bodily self-consciousness (BSC), which has been used to study cognitive brain mechanisms underlying body ownership and related aspects ...

2021

The Dimension of the Body in Higher Education: Matrix of Meanings in Students’ Diaries

Simon Nessim Henein, Ramiro Tau

In this paper, we attempt to show some consequences of bringing the body back into higher education, through the use of performing arts in the curricular context of scientific programs. We start by arguing that dominant traditions in higher education repro ...

2022

The perspectives of mapping and monitoring of the sense of self in neurosurgical patients

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin, Hyeongdong Park, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka, Pavo Orepic, Sixto Luis Alcoba Banqueri, Giannina Rita Iannotti

Surgical treatment of tumors, epileptic foci or of vascular origin, requires a detailed individual pre-surgical workup and intra-operative surveillance of brain functions to minimize the risk of post-surgical neurological deficits and decline of quality of ...

SPRINGER WIEN2021

Interoception and Empathy Impact Perspective Taking

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin, Jane Aspell, Lukas Heydrich

Adopting the perspective of another person is an important aspect of social cognition and has been shown to depend on multisensory signals from one's own body. Recent work suggests that interoceptive signals not only contribute to own-body perception and s ...

Frontiers Media2021

Evidence accumulation relates to perceptual consciousness and monitoring

Olaf Blanke, Fosco Bernasconi, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Mi Xue Tan, Michael Eric Anthony Pereira, Wenwen Chang

A fundamental scientific question concerns the neural basis of perceptual consciousness and perceptual monitoring resulting from the processing of sensory events. Although recent studies identified neurons reflecting stimulus visibility, their functional r ...

Nature Research2021

Response to commentaries on 'hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness'

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Aaron Schurger

In consciousness research, we have a very large number of theories, which exceeds by far the number of theories in other fields. We recently presented a set of criteria for evaluating and comparing theories of consciousness, and then applied the criteria t ...

2021