Publications by Bruno Herbelin

Pre-movement sensorimotor oscillations shape the sense of agency by gating cortical connectivity

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Nathaniel Evans, Bastien Orset

Our sense of agency, the subjective experience of controlling our actions, is a crucial component of self-awareness and motor control. It is thought to originate from the comparison between intentions and actions across broad cortical networks. However, th ...

2025

Human self and Neurosurgery: Advances and insights from Geneva

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke

Introduction: The preservation of the human self—a fundamental yet underexplored aspect of neurosurgical practice—has gained increasing attention in recent years. Research question: How can neural correlates of self-consciousness be identified, monitored, ...

2025

An embodied body morphology task for investigating self-avatar proportions perception in Virtual Reality

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The perception of one's own body is subject to systematic distortions and can be influenced by exposure to visual stimuli showing distorted bodies. In Virtual Reality (VR), echoing such body judgment inaccuracies, avatars with strong appearance dissimilari ...

2025

Meditation in the third-person perspective modulates minimal self and heartbeat-evoked potentials

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke

Experienced meditation practitioners often report altered states of their sense of self, including decentering and distancing the self from the body and one's current concerns. Altered states of the sense of self, such as disembodiment and distancing of th ...

Elsevier BV2025

Customizing the human-avatar mapping based on EEG error related potentials during avatar-based interaction

Ronan Boulic, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Bruno Herbelin, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Olaf Blanke, Fumiaki Iwane, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Objective. A key challenge of virtual reality (VR) applications is to maintain a reliable human-avatar mapping. Users may lose the sense of controlling (sense of agency), owning (sense of body ownership), or being located (sense of self-location) inside th ...

2024

Numerosity estimation of virtual humans as a digital-robotic marker for hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Fosco Bernasconi, Jevita Potheegadoo, Louis Philippe Albert

Nature Research2024

Embodiment in episodic memory through premotor-hippocampal coupling

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Nathalie Heidi Meyer, Jevita Potheegadoo, Baptiste Gauthier, Florian Lance, Mariana Babo Rebelo

Episodic memory (EM) allows us to remember and relive past events and experiences and has been linked to cortical-hippocampal reinstatement of encoding activity. While EM is fundamental to establish a sense of self across time, this claim and its link to t ...

Springer Science and Business Media LLC2024

Numerosity estimation impairment measurement system

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Fosco Bernasconi, Jevita Potheegadoo, Louis Philippe Albert

Numerosity estimation impairment measurement system for diagnostic/prognosis of a neurologi- cal disorder comprising an electronic display device configured to present 3D scene representa- tions/images comprising a plurality of 3D virtual visual stimulus t ...

2024

Virtual Reality for inward contemplation

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke

When performed at a high level, meditation and contemplative practices can give rise to altered states of consciousness, the study of which is key for cognitive neurosciences. Those effects indeed can help to better understand the underlying mechanisms of ...

ACM2024

In case of doubt, one follows one's self: the implicit guidance of the embodied self-avatar

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The sense of embodiment in virtual reality (VR) is commonly understood as the subjective experience that one's physical body is substituted by a virtual counterpart, and is typically achieved when the avatar's body, seen from a first-person view, moves lik ...

2024

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

GaitSkin system: Wireless vibrotactile skin patch with gait tracker for sensorimotor conflict creation

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Stéphanie Lacour, Ivan Furfaro, Emilio Fernández Lavado, Haotian Chen, Selim Jean Habiby Alaoui

This paper details the development and preliminary testing of GaitSkin, a wearable haptic interface designed for generating sensorimotor conflicts during locomotion. The system leverages real-time gait tracking and a wireless vibrotactile skin patch to pro ...

IEEE2023

Real-time Self-contact Retargeting of Avatars down to Finger Level

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Mathias Guy Delahaye

We interact with the world through a body that includes hands and fingers. Likewise, providing an avatar allowing the control of a virtual body with fingers is an important step to improve the user experience in VR. When the user and their avatar skeleton ...

The Eurographics Association2023

The full-body illusion changes visual depth perception

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka

Knowing where objects are relative to us implies knowing where we are relative to the external world. Here, we investigated whether space perception can be influenced by an experimentally induced change in perceived self-location. To dissociate real and ap ...

Nature Research2023

Avatar error in your favor: Embodied avatars can fix users’ mistakes without them noticing

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Mathias Guy Delahaye

In immersive Virtual Reality (VR), users can experience the subjective feeling of embodiment for the avatar representing them in a virtual world. This is known to be strongly supported by a high Sense of Agency (SoA) for the movements of the avatar that fo ...

2023

Virtual reality intervention alleviates dyspnoea in patients recovering from COVID-19 pneumonia

Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Sylvain Cardin, Oliver Alan Kannape, Jemina Fasola, Aline Schmit, Florian Lance, Sophie Jacqueline Andrée Betka

Background Immersive virtual reality (iVR)-based digital therapeutics are gaining clinical attention in the field of pain management. Based on known analogies between pain and dyspnoea, we investigated the effects of visual respiratory feedback on persiste ...

European Respiratory Soc Journals Ltd2023

EEG signature of breaks in embodiment in VR

Ronan Boulic, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Bruno Herbelin, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Olaf Blanke, Fumiaki Iwane, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

The brain mechanism of embodiment in a virtual body has grown a scientific interest recently, with a particular focus on providing optimal virtual reality (VR) experiences. Disruptions from an embodied state to a less- or non-embodied state, denominated Br ...

2023

Unintentional synchronization with self-avatar for upper- and lower-body movements

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The subjective experience of embodying an avatar when immersed in virtual reality (VR) is known to support the sense of presence and to help with the interaction in a virtual environment. Virtual embodiment is often thought of as the consequence of replace ...

2023

Reaching articular limits can negatively impact embodiment in virtual reality

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Olaf Blanke, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Providing Virtual Reality(VR) users with a 3D representation of their body complements the experience of immersion and presence in the virtual world with the experience of being physically located and more personally involved. A full-body avatar representa ...

2022

Rituals of art and science to decompart(mentalize) knowledge

Bruno Herbelin

We here explore the potential of rituals in order to more fully comprehend the subjective mechanisms of listening, leading to a broader understanding of phenomenal consciousness (why and how do I know that I am experiencing something?). The originality of ...

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and ISEA lnternational2022