Publications related to Phenomenology of Perception

Touch and Closeness in Naturally Organized Activities

Countless aspects of touch and closeness have been questioned in an unprecedented way during the recent Covid epidemic. Social practices as banal as greetings were both reflexively and practically challenged and sometimes deeply altered, resulting in painf ...

2024

Breathing affects self-other voice discrimination in a bodily state associated with somatic passivity

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Giulio Rognini, Hyeongdong Park, Pavo Orepic

A growing number of studies have focused on identifying cognitive processes that are modulated by interoceptive signals, particularly in relation to the respiratory or cardiac cycle. Considering the fundamental role of interoception in bodily self-consciou ...

WILEY2022

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

Breathing affect self-other voice discrimination in a bodily state with increased otherness

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Giulio Rognini, Hyeongdong Park, Pavo Orepic

A growing number of studies have focused on identifying cognitive processes that are modulated by interoceptive signals. Here we investigated whether interoception affects self-processing, by assessing changes in self-voice perception as a function of resp ...

2020

The Architectonic Experience of Body and Space in Augmented Interiors

Olaf Blanke, Isabella Maria Pasqualini, Andrea Serino, Maria Laura Blefari

The environment shapes our experience of space in constant interaction with the body. Architectonic interiors amplify the perception of space through the bodily senses; an effect also known as embodiment. The interaction of the bodily senses with the space ...

Frontiers Media2018

Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?

Michael Herzog, Frank Scharnowski

We experience the world as a seamless stream of percepts. However, intriguing illusions and recent experiments suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, perception seems to operate in a discrete manner, just ...

Public Library of Science2016

Changing motor perception by sensorimotor conflicts and body ownership

Olaf Blanke, Roy Salomon, Michiel van Elk, Joan Llobera Mahy, Natalia Fernandez

Experimentally induced sensorimotor conflicts can result in a loss of the feeling of control over a movement (sense of agency). These findings are typically interpreted in terms of a forward model in which the predicted sensory consequences of the movement ...

Nature Research2016

Visuo-vestibular mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness

Joachim Jean-Marie Forget

Bodily self-consciousness is linked to multisensory integration and is particularly dependent on vestibular perception providing the brain with the main sensory cues about body motion and location in space. Vestibular and visual inputs are permanently bala ...

EPFL2015

Balancing the Self

Mariia Kaliuzhna

The vestibular system is composed of otolith organs and semi-circular canals that encode linear and angular accelerations, as well as the position of the head with respect to gravity. Thus, the detection of self-motion, the distinction between self- and ob ...

EPFL2015

Spontaneously broken mass

Solomon G Shamsuddin Osman Endlich

The Galilei group involves mass as a central charge. We show that the associated superselection rule is incompatible with the observed phenomenology of superfluid helium 4: this is recovered only under the assumption that mass is spontaneou.519 broken. Thi ...

Springer Nature2015

Imagined own-body transformations during passive self-motion

Olaf Blanke, Michiel van Elk

Spatial perspective taking is a crucial social skill that underlies many of our everyday interactions. Previous studies have suggested that spatial perspective taking is an embodied process that involves the integration of both motor and proprioceptive inf ...

2014

The time of perception and the perception of time are not identical

Michael Herzog

Often it is assumed that the time of perception is identical or tightly linked to the perception of time. For example, we can clearly perceive a 20 ms delay of two squares presented one after the other at nearby locations (leading to the percept of apparen ...

2014

Visual capture and the experience of having two bodies – Evidence from two different virtual reality techniques

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin, Jane Aspell, Lukas Heydrich

In neurology and psychiatry the detailed study of illusory own body perceptions has suggested close links between bodily processing and self-consciousness. One such illusory own body perception is heautoscopy where patients have the sensation of being redu ...

Frontiers Media2013

Embodied space in architecture, cognitive neuroscience, and virtual reality

Isabella Maria Pasqualini

Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience enable improved understanding of embodiment and egocentric space in architecture. From a historical perspective the human body has been inferred as a reference in the debate of architectonic proportion. It was sugg ...

EPFL2012

Dissociation dynamics of singly charged vortices into half-quantum vortex pairs

Benoît Marie Joseph Deveaud, Vincenzo Savona, Timothy Chi Hin Liew, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, Francesco Manni

The quest for identification and understanding of fractional vorticity is a major subject of research in the quantum fluids domain, ranging from superconductors, superfluid Helium-3 to cold atoms. In a two-dimensional Bose degenerate gas with a spin degree ...

Nature Publishing Group2012

The thalamocortical vestibular system in animals and humans

Olaf Blanke, Christophe Lopez

The vestibular system provides the brain with sensory signals about three-dimensional head rotations and translations. These signals are important for postural and oculomotor control, as well as for spatial and bodily perception and cognition, and they are ...

Elsevier2011

L'habitant et la cohabitation dans les modèles de l'espace habité

André Ourednik

The notion of habiter (inhabiting in both a transitive and intransitive sense), developed in the course of the second half of the 20th century, made it possible to place the human individual in the center of spatial theories. Of phenomenological inspiratio ...

EPFL2010

Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood

Olaf Blanke

We highlight the latest research on body perception and self-consciousness, but argue that despite these achievements, central aspects have remained unexplored, namely, global aspects of bodily self-consciousness. Researchers investigated central represent ...

Elsevier2009

Why revelations have occurred on mountains? Linking mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience

Olaf Blanke

The fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions, among many other revelation experiences, had occurred on a mountain. These three revelation experiences share many phenomenological components like feeling and hearing a prese ...

Elsevier2005

Speaking with one's self - Autoscopic phenomena in writings from the ecstatic Kabbalah

Olaf Blanke

Immediate experience localizes the self within the limits of the physical body. This spatial unity has been challenged by philosophical and mystical traditions aimed to isolate concepts of mind and body. A more direct challenge of the spatial unity comes f ...

Imprint Academic2005