Publications related to The Complex Interplay Between Multisensory Integration and Perceptual Awareness

Subcortical correlates of consciousness with human single neuron recordings

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

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

Biases in Information Selection and Processing: Survey Evidence from the Pandemic

Andreas Fuster

We conduct two survey experiments to study which information people choose to consume and how it affects their beliefs. In the first experiment, respondents choose between optimistic and pessimistic article headlines related to the COVID-19 pandemic and ar ...

2024

Butterfly effects in perceptual development: A review of the 'adaptive initial degradation' hypothesis

Marin Vogelsang, Lukas Vogelsang

Human perceptual development evolves in a stereotyped fashion, with initially limited perceptual capabilities maturing over the months or years following the commencement of sensory experience into robust proficiencies. This review focuses on the functiona ...

Academic Press Inc Elsevier Science2024

Robotically-induced auditory-verbal hallucinations: combining self-monitoring and strong perceptual priors

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Fosco Bernasconi, Pavo Orepic, Melissa Faggella

Background. Inducing hallucinations under controlled experimental conditions in nonhallucinating individuals represents a novel research avenue oriented toward understanding complex hallucinatory phenomena, avoiding confounds observed in patients. Audito ...

2024

Spatial Modeling for Building Design Evaluation: from Visual Landscape Quality Assessment to Devaluation Risk Estimation

Adam Robert Swietek

Zoning reform is a crucial tool for cities to adapt to contemporary challenges. However, its implementation remains challenging. Property owners, with a vested interest in the value of their neighborhoods, are sensitive to local developments and the potent ...

EPFL2024

Voices from the Frontline: Revealing the AI Practitioners' viewpoint on the European AI Act

Kathrin Grosse

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly used in an ever larger number of industries. Alongside this development, however, abundant works argue that AI-driven systems are lacking in terms of safety, ethics and transparency. As a direct consequence, the ...

2024

Temporal aspects of feature integration in vision

Lukas Vogelsang

To fully comprehend visual perception, we need to necessarily understand its temporal dimension. Our visual environment is highly dynamic, requiring the processing and integration of temporal signals in order to make sense of it. Many processes, such as th ...

EPFL2024

Understanding and Enhancing Digital Wellbeing Dimensions: Empirical Studies on Smartphone Usage Patterns and Recommendations of Micro-Informative Content

Rania Islambouli

Digital technology has become an integral part of our lives, offering various benefits from communication and entertainment to education and productivity. However, its pervasive use has also raised concerns about its potential negative impact on users' wel ...

EPFL2024

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

Bone conduction facilitates self-other voice discrimination

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape, Nathan Quentin Faivre, 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

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

Curiosity-driven exploration: foundations in neuroscience and computational modeling

Wulfram Gerstner, Alireza Modirshanechi

Curiosity refers to the intrinsic desire of humans and animals to explore the unknown, even when there is no apparent reason to do so. Thus far, no single, widely accepted definition or framework for curiosity has emerged, but there is growing consensus th ...

Cell Press2023

Hierarchical processing underpins competition in tactile perceptual bistability

Andrea Ferrario

Ambiguous sensory information can lead to spontaneous alternations between perceptual states, recently shown to extend to tactile perception. The authors recently proposed a simplified form of tactile rivalry which evokes two competing percepts for a fixed ...

SPRINGER2023

Tuning perception and decisions to temporal context

David Pascucci

Recent work suggests that serial dependence, where perceptual decisions are biased toward previous stimuli, arises from the prior that sensory input is temporally correlated. However, existing studies have mostly used random stimulus sequences that do not ...

Cell Press2023

Me, Myself, and I: Neural Activity for Self versus Other across Development

Solange Noémie Jeanne Denervaud, Paola Zanchi

Although adults and children differ in self-vs.-other perception, a developmental perspective on this discriminative ability at the brain level is missing. This study examined neural activation for self-vs.-other in a sample of 39 participants spanning fou ...

MDPI2023

Neuronal correlates of goal-directed sensorimotor transformation in sensory, motor and higher-order cortical areas

Anastasiia Oryshchuk

An important function of the brain is to interpret incoming sensory information from the outside world to guide adaptive behavior. Understanding how and where sensory information is transformed into motor commands in a context- and learning-dependent manne ...

EPFL2023

Out-of-body illusion induced by visual-vestibular stimulation

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Florian Lance, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka, Hsin-Ping Wu, Estelle Nakul

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective feeling of being located outside one's physical body and perceiving one's own body from an elevated perspective looking downwards. OBEs have been correlated with abnormal integration of bod ...

Cell Press2023

Pre-stimulus alpha activity modulates long-lasting unconscious feature integration

Michael Herzog, David Pascucci, Maëlan Quentin Menétrey

Pre-stimulus alpha (α) activity can influence perception of shortly presented, low-contrast stimuli. The underlying mechanisms are often thought to affect perception exactly at the time of presentation. In addition, it is suggested that α cycles determine ...

2023

The Structure of Free Polyphony

Christoph Finkensiep

The human ability to perceive and understand music is remarkable. From an unstructured stream of acoustic input it creates a wide range of experiences, from psycho-acoustic effects to emotional and aesthetic responses. One such set of phenomena is the expe ...

EPFL2023

How I became myself after merging with a computer: Does human-machine symbiosis raise human rights issues?

Marcello Ienca

Novel usages of brain stimulation combined with artificially intelligent (AI) systems promise to address a large range of diseases. These new conjoined technologies, such as brain-computer interfaces (BCI), are increasingly used in experimental and clinica ...

ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC2023