@renzolanfranco
Principal Researcher in Cognitive Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. Interested in consciousness, visual & body perception, self, face recognition, metacognition & altered states of consciousness | https://ki.se/en/people/renzo-lanfranco
Today I am excited to introduce respyra - an open-source Python toolbox for respiratory tracking experiments in interoception research!
Now on PyPI (pip install respyra) with a preprint on PsyArXiv:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
GitHub: github.com/embodied-com...
A figure shwoing boxplots.
Happy to see this collaboration out - fun project led by Lorena Desdentado, Olga Pollatos, and colleagues using our heart rate discrimination task. "Cardiac interoception in action: Modulation after a stress induction with a speech task" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #neuroskyence
Next Consciousness Club is this Wednesday 25th Feb at 11am UK time!
Anat Arzi @anatarzi.bsky.social will be talking about "The Dynamics of (Un)Consciousness: Insights from Olfaction and Respiration"
All welcome, for more info and how to join please see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes...
Den här frågan är viktig för mig – skriv gärna under: www.mittskifte.org/petitions/in...
Our new paper on different types of underconfidence in relation to anxiety symptoms and gender out now in Psychological Medicine 😊
doi.org/10.1017/S003...
with @smfleming.bsky.social
New preprint: Confidence-accuracy dissociations in perceptual decision making. A review I was supposed to write 3 years ago for my VSS Young Investigator Award. Better late than never 😅 I tried to organize the literature and explore the likely mechanisms. Feedback welcome!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
How does the brain make the self feel grounded? In new work with Mariano D’Angelo, @brainself.bsky.social & @mariechancel.bsky.social, we show alpha oscillations set the time window for binding vision & touch, providing causal evidence for how body ownership emerges. Out in @natcomms.nature.com 🧠
New results! Faster parietal alpha frequency tightens, and slower alpha widens, the temporal window for vision–touch integration for the sense of one’s own body. Causal and computational evidence. Nature Communications
news.ki.se/how-brain-wa...
Congrats again, Pietro! 🎉
Happy to share that my popular science article in The Conversation, where I discuss our latest study on how the body contributes to conscious experience, has reached 150K reads worldwide. The Swedish magazine Forskning & Framsteg @fof.se has also published it in Swedish: fof.se/artikel/uppl...
Join us for a PhD in affective neuroscience at the Donders Institute (Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging) www.radboudumc.nl/en/vacancies...
are better-performing face recognition models more human-like? turns out: NO
in terms of how we see/treat different faces as similar/different to each other, there seems to be tradeoff: better models are LESS human-like
so they already work in some 'alien' ways...
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧠📈🧠🤖🧠💻
** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)
A study in @pnas.org reveals that conscious awareness is tightly linked to our sense of bodily self. Using bodily illusions and computational models, researchers show body ownership relies on conscious processing – reshaping theories of #Consciousness and self-perception 🧪 news.ki.se/new-study-re...
Metacognitive modeling of bodily self-awareness, made easy. Read The Conversation piece by @renzolanfranco.bsky.social about our new PNAS study here.
theconversation.com/why-our-phys...
Body ownership is not constructed unconsciously and then brought to awareness—it emerges directly in consciousness. A fundamental insight for understanding the bodily self, with clear implications for theories of consciousness. See PNAS article and thread below.
Also, check out my popular science article about this paper in @theconversation.com - theconversation.com/why-our-phys...
We thank @hakwan.bsky.social, Brian_Maniscalco, @smfleming.bsky.social, for their work on type-2 signal detection analysis, @kobedesender.bsky.social, Luc Vermeylen, Tom Verguts for their work on v-ratio, and @mariechancel.bsky.social for her work on RHI-based psychophysics. Please, share!
15/15 In sum, findings from a series of robust psychophysical experiments using signal detection analysis and computational modeling converge to suggest that body ownership multisensory processing occurs at the level of conscious processing.
14/15 We found that the rate of evidence accumulation for body ownership perception and for conscious awareness did not vary across visuotactile asynchronies, suggesting again that body ownership information is not processed in the absence of awareness.
13/15 Note that DDM produces several parameters that assess different dynamic aspects of perception, e.g., drift rate assesses accumulation speed and boundary separation assesses response caution as perceptual evidence is accumulated. v-ratio assesses accumulation speed for awareness.
12/15 What if the numbers of touches we chose aren't the most relevant ones? In Experiment 3, we implemented a sped-up version of our paradigm and applied drift-diffusion modeling (DDM) and v-ratio (a DDM variant of M-ratio) to test this in a dynamic framework.
11/15 Perception relies on evidence accumulation. To test whether the relationship between body ownership and awareness holds as evidence is accumulated, in Experiment 2, we varied the number of touches applied (3, 6, 9). We found conscious access remains constant across visuotactile asynchronies.
10/15 To test whether our findings are specific to body ownership rather than visuotactile processing, in Control Exp. 2, we used blocks of wood instead of rubber hands, and instead of ownership, we asked them to judge visuotactile synchronicity. Here, we did find differences in conscious access.
9/15 To ensure that participants focused on their feeling of ownership rather than on visuotactile synchronicity, in Control Exp. 1, we rotated the rubber hands by 90 degrees (which abolishes the RHI), and found chance sensitivity, suggesting that participants focused on ownership in the main Exp.
8/15 Body ownership processing and conscious access to body ownership arose together, ruling out unconscious processing. To test this further, we used a Bayesian hierarchical model of metacognitive efficiency (M-ratio): conscious access did not vary between asynchronies.
7/15 Using signal detection analysis, we found that the sensitivity of body ownership to visuotactile asynchrony was above chance from 31 ms of asynchrony, but not at 18 ms. We found equivalent results for the sensitivity of perceptual awareness to body ownership discrimination.
6/15 In our task, participants report which rubber hand feels most like theirs (2AFC discrimination) and the clarity of their experience (perceptual awareness scale) across different visuotactile asynchronies. Importantly, visuotactile synchrony is a proxy for visuotactile integration.
6/15 We used a novel and robust psychophysical paradigm that employs robotic arms to induce the RHI: one arm taps the hidden participant’s hand, while the other two tap two rubber hands on sight. One rubber hand is stroked in sync with the real hand, and the other is stroked with a varying delay.
5/15 Most studies have used questionnaires or indirect measures (e.g., Galvanic response) to assess body ownership, which cannot distinguish between conscious and unconscious processing or account for postperceptual factors (e.g., decision bias). How can we assess body ownership objectively, then?