Publications related to Neuroscience of free will

Temporal windows of unconscious processing cannot easily be disrupted

Michael Herzog, Leila Drissi Daoudi - Kleinbauer, Lukas Vogelsang

Conscious perception is preceded by long periods of unconscious processing. These periods are crucial for analyzing temporal information and for solving the many ill-posed problems of vision. An important question is what starts and ends these windows and ...

Assoc Research Vision Ophthalmology Inc2024

Weakly-supervised Action Transition Learning for Stochastic Human Motion Prediction

Mathieu Salzmann, Wei Mao

We introduce the task of action-driven stochastic human motion prediction, which aims to predict multiple plausible future motions given a sequence of action labels and a short motion history. This differs from existing works, which predict motions that ei ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2022

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

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

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

The effect of frontoparietal paired associative stimulation on decision-making and working memory

Traian Popa

Previous single-site neurostimulation experiments have unsuccessfully attempted to shift decision-making away from habitual control, a fast, inflexible cognitive strategy, towards goal-directed control, a flexible, though computationally expensive strategy ...

2019

Pro Free Will Priming Enhances "Risk-Taking" Behavior in the Iowa Gambling Task, but Not in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task: Two Independent Priming Studies

Christine Mohr, Noé Thomas Elie Ohana, Alessandro Tremea

Studies indicated that people behave less responsibly after exposure to information containing deterministic statements as compared to free will statements or neutral statements. Thus, deterministic primes should lead to enhanced risk-taking behavior. We t ...

Public Library Science2016

An invisible touch: Body-related multisensory conflicts modulate visual consciousness

Olaf Blanke, Roy Salomon, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Javier Bello Ruiz, Marta Lukowska

The majority of scientific studies on consciousness have focused on vision, exploring the cognitive and neural mechanisms of conscious access to visual stimuli. In parallel, studies on bodily consciousness have revealed that bodily (i.e. tactile, proprioce ...

Elsevier2016

The Insula Mediates Access to Awareness of Visual Stimuli Presented Synchronously to the Heartbeat

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin, Jonathan Dönz, Roy Salomon, Roberta Ronchi, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Javier Bello Ruiz, Rémi Martet

The processing of interoceptive signals in the insular cortex is thought to underlie self-awareness. However, the influence of interoception on visual awareness and the role of the insular cortex in this process remain unclear. Here, we show in a series of ...

Soc Neuroscience2016

Numerical Priming Between Touch and Vision Depends on Tactile Discrimination

Olaf Blanke, Roy Salomon, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Laurène Véronique Vuillaume

Although the interaction between vision and touch is of crucial importance for perceptual and bodily self-consciousness, only little is known regarding the link between conscious access and tactile processing. Here, we tested whether the numerical encoding ...

Sage Publications Ltd2015

Long-lasting visual integration of form, motion, and color as revealed by visual masking

Michael Herzog

When two similar visual stimuli are presented in rapid succession at the same location, they fuse. For example, a red and a green disk are perceived as one single yellow disk. Likewise, verniers with opposite offset directions are perceived as one vernier ...

Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology2013

Self-paced Movement Intention Detection from Human Brain Signals: Invasive and Non-invasive EEG

José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Eileen Lew Yi Lee, Huaijian Zhang

Neural signatures of humans’ movement intention can be exploited by future neuroprosthesis. We propose a method for detecting self-paced upper limb movement intention from brain signals acquired with both invasive and noninvasive methods. In the first stud ...

Ieee2012

Act Quickly, Decide Later: Long-latency Visual Processing Underlies Perceptual Decisions but Not Reflexive Behavior

Humans largely guide their behavior by their visual representation of the world. Recent studies have shown that visual information can trigger behavior within 150 msec, suggesting that visually guided responses to external events, in fact, precede consciou ...

2011

Feeling in control of your footsteps: Conscious gait monitoring and the auditory consequences of footsteps

Martin Vetterli, Olaf Blanke, Christof Faller, Fritz Menzer, Pär Halje

A fundamental aspect of the “I” of conscious experience is that the self is experienced as a single coherent representation of the entire, spatially situated body. The purpose of the present study was to investigate agency for the entire body. We provided ...

2010

The limits of agency in walking humans

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape, Ravi Tej Sai Giridhar Tadi

An important principle of human ethics is that individuals are not responsible for actions performed when unconscious. Recent research found that the generation of an action and the building of a conscious experience of that action (agency) are distinct pr ...

Elsevier2010