From being to identity: analysis and synthesis of the self

Interoception is the process by which the nervous system senses, integrates and interprets internal bodily sensations, such as signals arising from the heart. Affective and emotional feeling states are influenced by different levels of interoceptive processing. These levels encompass afferent, neural, behavioural accuracy and higher-order measures related to interoceptive judgments ascertained via subjective report and the attribution of bodily signals. This talk will detail how these different interoceptive dimensions, at different levels of processing, can guide and shape cognition and emotion processing. The nature of afferent signals, their representation in brain, their precision and higher order representation are selectively altered in different clinical conditions, with implications for symptom expression.

Professor Sarah Garfinkel

University College London, UK

Professor Sarah Garfinkel

University College London, UK

Sarah Garfinkel is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Group Leader of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London (UCL). She completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology the University of Sussex, before undergoing a fellowship in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan with further training in Autonomic Neuroscience at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School. Her current work at UCL focuses on brain-body interactions underlying emotion and cognition, with a particular focus on the heart. Adopting a translational perspective, she investigates the relationship between cardiac mechanisms and emotion in different clinical conditions. In September 2018, Sarah was named by the journal Nature as one of 11 "Rising Star" researchers, across all STEM disciplines internationally. In 2021 Sarah was awarded the mid-career prize by the British Cognitive Neuroscience Society. 

This talk presents a snippet from the planned article (with Olaf Blanke) for the PTRS-B on Phantomology. Phantomology, a term borrowed from Stanisław Lem, is the study of the virtual reality of the "body-in-the-brain", that is, the phenomenal awareness of having a bodily existence. Across all levels of phantomisation—phantom limbs, phantom hemibodies, and phantoms of the self (doppelgänger)—clinical cases reveal striking instances of aggression toward the body or some of its parts. Professor Brugger will touch on anarchic limbs, the hatred of hemiplegic twins, and hostile doppelgänger. Additionally, he will discuss Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID), better known as the desire for healthy limb amputation. Professor Brugger will share his ambivalence regarding its classification as a mental disorder in ICD-11. Is it pathological to desire the amputation of a major limb? Where is the boundary between erotic and hostile body modification? Phantomology seeks to provide a unified framework for understanding the relationship between body and self—one that includes psychological dimensions, regardless of whether such experiences are deemed healthy, pathological, or otherwise deviant by a given society.

Professor Peter Brugger

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Professor Peter Brugger

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Professor Brugger was born in 1957 and grew up in Zurich, Switzerland. After work as an Elementary School teacher, he studied biology at the University of Zurich (promotion in zoology) and received postdoctoral trainings at UC San Diego and University of Victoria (Canada). Back in Switzerland (with wife Susan, two boys and an American girl), he worked as a clinical neuropsychologist at the University Hospital Zurich (head of Unit since 2003). His main research interests are: randomness and behaviour, neuropsychology of belief and para-normal ideation, creativity and madness, representation of body, space and time. In his last few years before retirement (in 2023), he conducted clinical work at a Rehabilitation Centre in the Swiss mountains (Valens).

Successful communication depends largely on the appropriate temporal organisation of intrapersonal and interpersonal signals in non-verbal communication. The psychopathological condition of ASD can serve as a diversity model for the intrapersonal and interpersonal synchrony of communicative signals. Our own studies on the intrapersonal synchrony of pointing behaviour and gaze behaviour showed a higher latency between the two signals and a higher variability in people with ASD. When comparing social pointing behaviour with simple motor tasks, we only found cross-domain associations between social and non-social traits in control subjects, but not in autistic individuals. This argues against a general synchronisation deficit in ASD and instead underlines the individual developmental heterogeneity in the acquisition of domain-specific behaviours. When transferring this measured nonverbal behaviour to virtual characters, the behaviour of the characters indicating ASD led to overall prolonged decoding times in the observers, and this effect was even more pronounced in observers with ASD. The results emphasise the importance of temporal differences in production and perception processes during multimodal nonverbal communication. These studies are complemented by findings that individuals with ASD are not able to recognise social intentions in gaze behaviour. Finally, dyadic communication shows that reciprocal gaze plays a much smaller role in encounters between individuals with ASD. In summary, results suggest that the coordination of communicative signals both intra- and interpersonally contribute to successful communication. To summarise, the current findings locate the manifestation of reduced reciprocity in autism not only in the person, but also in the interactional dynamics of dyads.

Professor Kai Vogeley

University of Cologne, Germany

Professor Kai Vogeley

University of Cologne, Germany

Kai Vogeley studied medicine and philosophy in Duesselford, Baltimore and London. After residencies in neuropathology, neurology and psychiatry, he passed board examinations in clinical neurology as well as psychiatry and psychotherapy. He is currently Professor for Psychiatry at the University Hospital Cologne and group leader for "social cognition" both at the Department of Psychiatry and the Institute for Neuroscience and Medicine - Cognitive Neuroscience (INM3) at the Research Centre Juelich. His research interests are social cognition and social neuroscience, experience of time, neurobiology of autism and schizophrenia, and philosophical aspects of psychopathology and neurosciences.

The self is formed not only in individual context, but also during, and through, interactions with others. In this talk, I will focus on one of the aspects of the minimal self, namely sense of agency, in the context of social interactions. I will present empirical work conducted in my lab, where we studied sense joint agency in joint actions, individual sense of agency in a social context and vicarious sense of agency. Importantly, I will discuss social interactions not only with other humans, but also (and primarily) with humanoid robots. It is the latter case that provides important insights on conditions under which sense of agency is affected by social context. More specifically, our results show that attribution of intentionality to the robot partner is a key factor determining the emergence of sense of joint agency. On the other hand, physical embodiment and sensorimotor repertoire analogous to that of a human are crucial for vicarious sense of agency to occur. I will discuss the insights obtained through our empirical work in broader context of extended self.

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska

Italian Institute of Technology, Italy

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska

Italian Institute of Technology, Italy

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska is the head of the unit "Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction" at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Genoa, Italy. She is also the Coordinator of the Centre for Human Technologies (IIT). She has a Master's Degree in Neuro-Cognitive Psychology (2006) and a PhD in Psychology (2008) from the Ludwig Maximillian University Munich. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting grant "InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement". She is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics. Between 2022 and 2024 she served in the role of President of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). In 2023 she was awarded the Hans-Fischer Senior Fellowship from the TUM Institute of Advanced Studies to lead a research group "Human Cognition in Neuroengineering". She combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with other humans and technology.

How do we know and experience ourselves as existing over time? How is it that, despite the many changes that we encounter over our lifetime, we have some sense of a persisting entity that remains with us as we age? Diachronic unity is fundamental to the temporally-extended self, enabling us to simultaneously hold both changes and continuity of the self over time – and to reconcile and integrate these two aspects of self. In this talk, I will discuss evidence for a candidate cognitive mechanism underpinning diachronic unity: autobiographical memory. Remembering our previous experiences or possessing knowledge of what has happened in our lives provide direct connections to our past selves and a confirmation of our existence over time. Similarly, prospection enables the extension of the self into the future and is also argued to be underpinned by autobiographical memory. I will discuss evidence from neuropsychology that the loss of autobiographical memory can erode the temporal self by degrading these connections to our past and future selves, as well as new neuroscientific research on the temporal self at timescales of seconds to years. Finally, I will consider the idea that non-mnemonic processes may provide an important basis for the temporal continuity of the self.

Professor Donna Rose Addis

University of Toronto, Canada

Professor Donna Rose Addis

University of Toronto, Canada

Dr Donna Rose Addis is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Aging, Senior Scientist at the Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. She worked at Harvard University and the University of Auckland before moving to Canada in 2018. Dr Addis is a cognitive neuroscientist who combines neuroimaging, behavioural and neuropsychological methods to investigate how the human brain remembers past experiences, imagines future events and constructs a coherent sense of self, as well as how these abilities differ with age, mood disorders, and memory loss. Her work has yielded new theoretical and philosophical perspectives, including the reconceptualization of memory as future-orientated. With over 130 publications and more than 26,000 citations, she has received a number of prestigious early career awards, and is the youngest-ever fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Individuals in the modern world have complex social identities based on the groups and social categories with which they identify. Social psychology has shown that identifying with groups, even artificial minimal groups, generates behavioural effects in adults and children, such as ingroup favouritism, loyalty, and conformity. We propose that such effects originated evolutionarily from humans' unique skills and motivations to form shared agencies, with the evolutionarily original form of social identity being one's moral identity as a cooperative group member. For ancient humans, survival depend on being an assimilated member of a cultural group that was in turn competing against other groups. This context selected for self-reflective capacity to adopt a social identity (ie to view oneself as a member of a particular group) and concomitant self-regulatory motivations to maintain a positive social identity (ie to ensure that "I" the individual am being in line with what "we" the group expect, often via conformity). This evolutionary perspective helps account for a range of findings. Behavioural effects of group identity (eg ingroup favouritism, loyalty, conformity), moral emotions (eg guilt), and moral reasoning (eg deploying reasons and justifications to defend against threats to one's moral identity) are all expressions of social identity as a self-regulatory mechanism for maintaining one's good standing as a committed and trustworthy group member.

Dr Leon Li

Leipzig University, Germany

Dr Leon Li

Leipzig University, Germany

Dr Leon Li is a postdoctoral researcher at Leipzig University in Dr Sebastian Grueneisen's Cooperative Minds Lab. His postdoctoral research investigates the ontogeny of prosocially motivated rule-breaking and is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He obtained his PhD in 2022 at Duke University, advised by Dr Michael Tomasello, and his dissertation was titled The Development of Language and Morality as Forms of Social Action. Since his early days working as an undergraduate research assistant with Dr l Robert Slevc and Dr Melanie Killen at the University of Maryland, his research interests have broadly spanned the topics of language, morality, and social cognition. In addition to social identity, another topic he is currently investigating with Dr Gueneisen and Dr Tomasello is children's understanding of the objective reality (the other side of false belief).

Humans experience a ‘real me’ that ‘resides’ in ‘my’ body and is experienced as the subject (or ‘I’) of conscious experience and thought. This aspect of self-consciousness, namely the feeling that conscious experiences are bound to the self and are experiences of a unitary entity (‘I’), is often considered to be one of the most astonishing features of the human mind. Professor Blanke will present recent work that targets self-consciousness by investigating a minimal form of self-consciousness that is based on the multisensory perception of tactile, proprioceptive, visual signals as well as interoceptive signals and has been studied in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and in neurological patients (ie bodily self-consciousness, BSC). Highlighting a series of studies investigating two fundamental aspects of BSC, referred to as self-location and self-identification with an individual’s body, Professor Blanke shows that BSC is based on torso-centered signals in a distributed cortical network, centered in temporo-parietal cortex. Such a torso-centered BSC system, by coupling exteroceptive and interoceptive signals, is fundamental for self-consciousness, leading to conscious mental states that are experienced as if by a unitary and embodied subject. In a second part of his presentation, Professor Blanke will highlight recent work that explores links between BSC (self-location, the first-person perspective, sense of agency) and so-called extended or narrative self-consciousness (NSC), in particular spatial navigation and episodic autobiographical memory. He will present data showing that changes in BSC impact (1) spatial navigation performance and grid-cell like activity in entorhinal cortex and are of relevance (2) in episodic autobiographical memory, mediated by hippocampal activity coupled with BSC regions. These data link key subjective components of BSC with spatial navigation and the subjective reliving of personal events from one’s past.

Professor Olaf Blanke

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

Professor Olaf Blanke

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

Olaf Blanke is Bertarelli Foundation Chair of Cognitive Neuroprosthetics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), where he directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at Geneva's Campus Biotech. He founded and directed EPFL’s Center for Neuroprosthetics (now EPFL’s Neuro-X Institute) and is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Geneva University Hospital. Blanke’s research focuses on the neuroscience of consciousness and embodiment, hallucinations and human augmentation as well as neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. Blanke pioneered robotics and virtual reality technology in neuroscience of consciousness, cognitive science, and recently meditation practice. Blanke has made several seminal contributions towards a neuroscientific theory of self-consciousness and showed how self-consciousness depends on cortical processing of specific multisensory bodily signals. This research established a data-driven model of self-consciousness and introduced the concept of bodily self-consciousness - a perceptual account of self-consciousness - that is based the processing of multisensory bodily signals (exteroceptive and interoceptive signals). He has over 250 peer-reviewed scientific publications in high-impact journals, including Nature and Science and his work has been cited over 30'000 times. His medical-translational activities are dedicated to preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and devices in Parkinson’s disease and dementias, sustaining mental health and preventing cognitive decline. Blanke is co-founder of the wellbeing technology company Metaphysiks Engineering and member of the board and chief scientific advisor of the digital neurotherapeutics company Mindmaze.