Publications related to Artificial consciousness

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

Playing Brains: The Ethical Challenges Posed by Silicon Sentience and Hybrid Intelligence in DishBrain

The convergence of human and artificial intelligence is currently receiving considerable scholarly attention. Much debate about the resulting Hybrid Minds focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence into the human brain through intelligent brain- ...

2023

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

Challenges and approaches in bridging the biomimicry gap in biohybrid systems of fish and robots

Vaios Papaspyros

As the field of ethology advances, especially over the past two decades, the role of animal-robot interaction tools has increasingly become essential. This importance arises from the need for controlled, repetitive, repeatable, and long-duration experiment ...

EPFL2023

Perceptual Learning: Policy Insights From Basic Research to Real-World Applications

Michael Herzog

Perceptual learning is the process by which experience alters how incoming sensory information is processed by the brain to give rise to behavior-it is critical for how humans educate children, train experts, treat diseases, and promote health and well-bei ...

Sage Publications Inc2023

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

Agency Deficits in a Human Genetic Model of Schizophrenia: Insights From 22q11DS Patients

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Roy Salomon, Maude Schneider, Oliver Alan Kannape, Mariia Kaliuzhna, Henrique Galvan Debarba

Schizophrenia is a chronic and disabling mental illness characterized by a disordered sense of self. Current theories suggest that deficiencies in the sense of control over one’s actions (Sense of Agency, SoA) may underlie some of the symptoms of schizophr ...

2022

SPAHM: the spectrum of approximated Hamiltonian matrices representations

Anne-Clémence Corminboeuf, Ksenia Briling, Alberto Fabrizio

Physics-inspired molecular representations are the cornerstone of similarity-based learning applied to solve chemical problems. Despite their conceptual and mathematical diversity, this class of descriptors shares a common underlying philosophy: they all r ...

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

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

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 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

Breathing is coupled with voluntary action and the cortical readiness potential

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape, Hyeongdong Park, Coline Barnoud, Henri Dan Trang

Voluntary action is a fundamental element of self-consciousness. The readiness potential (RP), a slow drift of neural activity preceding self-initiated movement, has been suggested to reflect neural processes underlying the preparation of voluntary action; ...

Nature Research2020

First-person body view modulates the neural substrates of episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: A functional connectivity study

Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville, Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin, Thomas William Arthur Bolton, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Baptiste Gauthier, Robin Mange, Florian Lance, Lucie Bréchet

Episodic memory (EM) is classically conceived as a memory for events, localized in space and time, and characterized by autonoetic consciousness (ANC) allowing to mentally travel back in time and subjectively relive an event. Building on recent evidence th ...

2020

Postural Control and Consciousness and Their Applications to Lower-Limb Exoskeletons

Jemina Fasola

Human postural control requires high coordination and is distributed over the whole musculoskeletal and nervous systems. Hence, postural balance can be impaired due to various pathologies. Efficient rehabilitation programs and technological solutions are t ...

EPFL2020