SEMINARS
Our seminars are free and held online via zoom. To attend please register via the links below.
March 20th 2025
245pm CET
Cristina Becchio &
Pablo Lanillos
Registration link (free)
Cristina Becchio
Bio
Cristina Becchio is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Germany. She originally studied philosophy before shifting her research focus to cognitive science and neuroscience. Prior to joining Hamburg, she was a Full Professor at the University of Turin and a Senior Scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. Her research explores the relationship between movement and cognition, investigating how mental state information is encoded and read out in movement. In this field, she was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant, followed up by an ERC Proof-of-Concept grant.
Abstract
Traditionally, it has been assumed that we have privileged access to the states 'internal' to our bodies—an access that cannot be extended to other bodies. However, observing other bodies in motion provides a powerful window into their cognitive states. In my talk, I will introduce kinematic coding, an experimental and computational framework developed in my lab to measure how cognitive state information is encoded and read out in movement kinematics. I will discuss the potential of this approach for quantifying the social transmission of information in naturalistic behavior and its role in action prediction. Finally, using fear transmission as an experimental model, I will present some ideas on how kinematic coding can be amplified in virtual reality to enhance social transmission.
Pablo Lanillos
Bio
Pablo Lanillos leads the Neuro AI and Robotics group (NAIR) at the Cajal Neuroscience Center, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), guest researcher at Donders Institute for Cognition, and member of the ELLIS Nijmegen unit. His research leitmotif is to transform our understanding of human cognition into future technologies. His team develops neuroscience-inspired AI algorithms for achieving human-like perception and action in robots, and for providing better models of body perception. His lab is well known for Active Inference research in robotics. He completed his doctoral studies in Computer Engineering at the Complutense University of Madrid, got the Marie-Skłodowska Curie award at the Technical University of Munich, gained tenure as an Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen and obtained a permanent position at the CSIC in 2025.
Abstract
Under the unrealistic and ethically doubtful endeavour of building conscious machines, we faced the complexity of constructing a synthetic self on a robot with neuro-inspired principles. We comprehended that understanding how the brain perceives and controls the body is the starting point of the self and embodiment is actual physical intelligence. Grounded on well-known theories, such as the Ideomotor, the Comparator model, and the Free Energy Principle, I describe a set of experiments and theoretical proposals that drive us from learning the sensorimotor mapping behind body ownership to controlling and anticipating consequences of the robot actions—developing some kind of agentive behaviour—and finalising with the description of the active self, where the self participates in a problem-solving task.
As a side debate, I would like to prompt a discussion with the BRnet community on how these results can help us to develop new embodied technology, such as wearable robots that are unconsciously and consciously assimilated (to some extent).
January 17th 2025
3pm ECT
Ana Tajadura Jimenez & Adrian Alsmith
Book via this Eventbrite Link
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez
Ana Tajadura-Jiménez is an Associate Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and Honorary Research Fellow at the University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC). She leads the i_mBODY lab, where they conduct multidisciplinary research at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Cognitive Neuroscience and Engineering. Her team investigates how to design novel sensorial and body-centred paradigms and technologies that change people’s perceptions of their own body and the world, their interactions and emotions. One of the aims of this research is to inform solutions that support emotional and physical health, as well as drive behaviour change in real-world contexts.
She holds a European Research Council Consolidator Grant BODYinTRANSIT (2022-2026). Previously, she obtained a PhD in Applied Acoustics from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Lab of Action and Body at Royal Holloway, University of London, an ESRC Future Research Leader and Principal Investigator of The Hearing Body project at University College London Interaction Centre and a Ramón y Cajal fellow at Universidad Loyola Andalucía.
Abstract
Music makes us dance and move, but can sounds do more for our body? We may easily think that hearing is the least relevant modality for our sense of bodily self, compared, for instance, to touch, vision and interoception. Yet audition provides rich information about what is happening inside and crucially outside of our bodies: we hear ourselves breathing, or our joints crack; we hear our hands clapping against each other or stroking a piece of velvet; we hear the sounds of our footsteps mixing with those of others as we go down the stairs. Rarely is there an action or event that we are involved in which is silent, and yet audition remains relatively ignored as a contributor to our sense of self. This talk will highlight the surprising but also special contributions that audition brings to our sense of bodily self.
Adrian Alsmith
Adrian Alsmith is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at King’s College London. He studied Philosophy & Psychology at Warwick and gained his postgraduate degrees at Edinburgh and Mainz, as part of interdisciplinary research training networks funded by the European Science Foundation and the European Council’s FP7. Before coming to King’s he held research and teaching positions at the University of Copenhagen (2012–2018), École Normale Supérieure, Paris (2018–2019), and the University of Barcelona (2019–2020). His research interests include narrative explanation, bodily awareness as a form of self-consciousness, virtual reality, and the distinction between imaginative perception and illusion. He is currently working on a book on bodily self-consciousness.
Abstract
In this talk, I wish to engage with a central conceptual issue in the study of bodily self-consciousness: body representation is neither sufficient nor necessary for self-consciousness. One can mentally represent that which is in fact one's own body, without thereby being conscious of that body as oneself. Moreover, we have a great variety of ways of thinking about ourselves, many of which do not involve body representation in any obvious sense. Reflection on these ways in which body representation and self-consciousness are dissociable presses the need to give some account of what is required for their connection in bodily self-consciousness. My aim in this talk is to give some indication of how the capacities for intentional bodily action and thought about the world beyond one's experience serve this role. I hope thereby to show how body representation, agency and objective thought might jointly contribute to bodily self-consciousness.
December 12th, 2023
12pm GMT
Prof Henrik Ehrsson
Perception of Body Ownership
Abstract
How do we develop a continuous and coherent perception of our own body, distinct from the external world? This seminar explores the computational principles and neural mechanisms behind the perception of one's body as one’s own, also known as the sense of body ownership. I will first discuss findings from psychophysics experiments based on the rubber hand illusion, which serves as a model system for studying body ownership in healthy individuals. The results indicate that subtle variations in the temporal or spatial incongruence of multisensory information—within the classical temporal and spatial rules of the illusion—influence body ownership perception, suggesting that continuous functions rather than fixed rules determine body ownership. Next, I will consider behavioral studies that test causal inference models of body ownership and find that the likelihood of experiencing the illusion of a fake hand as one's own increases with visual or proprioceptive noise, as predicted by the model. Additionally, I will describe a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, which identified how activity in posterior parietal cortices can predict an individual's likelihood of perceiving illusory hand ownership in accordance with the causal inference model. Finally, I will discuss insights gained into the underlying neural mechanisms obtained through direct electrophysiological recordings of the human cortex using electrocorticography. Collectively, the talk will convey the take-home message that the perception of body ownership is determined by probabilistic principles, emphasizing the importance of multisensory integration and the influence of sensory uncertainty
About the Speaker
Prof. Ehrsson studied medicine at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Following which he completed a PhD also at Karolinska in the Department of Neuroscience and Woman and Child Health, under the supervision of Hans Forssberg and co-supervised by Per Roland. Following the successful completion of his PhD, Prof Ehrsson then moved to University College London to complete a four-year postdoc at The Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging supervised by Richard E. Passingham before moving back to Karolinska Institutet in 2006 as an Assistant Professor in Department of Neuroscience.
Prof. Ehrsson was then promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2009 and to full Professor in 2013. Prof. Ehrsson has held many prestigious grants including the ERC starting and advanced awards as well as the Future Research Leader in Sweden award from the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research and the Distinguished Professor award from the Swedish Research Foundation. Prof. Ehrsson has published 97 original peer-reviewed scientific articles which have received over 12,000 citations in total. Several of these articles have been published in leading scientific journals such as Science, Neuron, PNAS, Current Biology, Nature Communications, eLife and The Journal of Neuroscience.
March 31, 2023
12pm BST
Dr Liuba Papeo (speaker)
Bodies interacting in vision
Abstract
A common view is that sociality has contributed to shape the functioning of high-level cognitive systems. I will discuss how sociality has also re-shaped the functioning of visual perception (and visual brain areas), making it highly specialized and sophisticated. I will present a set of studies using behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies on human adults and preverbal infants. Going beyond the visual specialization for faces and bodies, the results of those studies demonstrate the existence of visual perceptual mechanisms dedicated to processing multiple faces/bodies. These mechanisms can explain how the representation of social interaction emerges from object perception, through the analysis of spatial relationships between multiple faces and bodies in a visual scene.
About the Speaker
Liuba Papeo is a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in Neuroscience (International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA, Trieste, Italy), Directrice de Recherche (Full professor) at the CNRS in France.
Her PhD thesis addressed the role of modality-specific sensory-motor systems in higher-level processes such as conceptual knowledge and word understanding, using lesion studies and behavioral tests on brain-damaged patients, non-invasive brain stimulation (TMS) and functional neuroimaging (fMRI). The thesis received two prizes, from the Italian Association of Psychology and from the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste (2011).
In 2011, she was awarded a “Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship”, which funded three years of postdoc at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University. Here, in collaboration with Prof. Alfonso Caramazza and Alvaro Pascual-Leone (Harvard Medical School), she studied the network dynamics supporting language and concepts. In 2014, she obtained a fellowship from the UPFellows Cofund Program of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona and the European Research Council, for a four-years research program on the cognitive and neural mechanisms for action understanding, carried out at the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona.
She was recruited as tenured researcher by the CNRS and joined the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in 2016. In 2017, I obtained a European Research Council Starting grant. At the CNRS, I have developed a research program on the representation of relations, and established the research team “Cognitive neurodevelopment”. Since 2019, our team is member of the Laboratoire d’Excellence (LabEX) CORTEX of the University of Lyon. Since 2021, she is Directrice de Recherche (Full professor) at the CNRS. As a researcher, she is committed to contributing to scientific advancements as well as to using my role and position to increase equality and inclusion. The latter goal is as important to me as the former.
About the Discussant
Alice Gomez is a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in the neurospychology of memory (University Grenoble Alpes). She is an Assistant Professor in cognitive psychology at University Lyon 1. After her Ph.D, Alice stayed as a postdoc at Unicog, INSERM to study children with Developmental Coordination Disorder. In 2011 She joined the Institute of Cognitve Science Marc Jeannerod where she studied motor awareness in children then she moved to the Center of Research in Neuroscience where she won a National Grant to study Body representation in typical and atypical motor development.
Dec 7th, 2022
12pm GMT (1pm CEST)
Prof Chris Dijkerman (Speaker)
Dr Catherine Preston (Discussant)
Interacting components of body perception
An important function of the somatosensory system is to provide information about our body. Different aspects of the body can be perceived, such as the size of body parts (metric body perception), affective aspects like pain and pleasant touch (affective body perception), the experience of owning your body (body ownership) and the perception of the body structure (structural body perception). In our recent review (De Haan & Dijkerman, 2020), we suggested that they are subserved by overlapping neural networks. This would suggest that these components are also functionally linked. In this presentation, I will discuss evidence for the idea of functionally interdependent body perception components from studies in our lab. I will present studies with neurological and psychiatric patients as well as with healthy participants. These findings provide evidence for how different body perception components interact. This is not only of interest for understanding the functional organization of body perception, but also provides pointers for how to reduce body perception disturbances in various clinical groups.
Speaker Chris Dijkerman is a neuropsychologist working on sensory processing for perception and the guidance of action. Specifically he is known for his research in somatosensory processing and its focus on touch, pain and itch perception, peripersonal space and visual control of action. Prof. Dijkerman gained his PhD, working in London and Oxford on sensorimotor consequences of hemispherectomy under supervision of Prof. Larry Weiskrantz and Prof. Faraneh Vargha-Khadem. Next, he spent a year at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol investigating outcome after stroke rehabilitation after which he moved to St. Andrews University to work as a postdoc with Prof. David Milner on visual perception and action. In 2000, he started at Utrecht University, where he has been appointed as professor of Neuropsychology in 2012.
Discussant Catherine Preston completed a BSc in Psychology with Neuroscience at the University of Leicester in 2004 and then a Ph.D in Psychology at the University of Nottingham in 2008. After her Ph.D, Catherine stayed as a postdoc at the University of Nottingham until 2010 when she took a position as temporary lecturer at Nottingham Trent University. In 2011 Catherine then moved to the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm where she won two fellowships, the Wenner Gren foreign researcher fellowship and Marie Curie Intra European Fellowship before starting her lectureship at the University of York in 2015.