Publications by Christian Pfeiffer

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.

This commentary aims to find the right description of the pre-reflective brain mechanisms underlying our phenomenal experience of being a subject bound to a physical body (bodily self) and basic cognitive, perceptual, and subjective aspects related to inte ...

A central feature of our consciousness is the experience of the self as a unified entity residing in a physical body, termed bodily self-consciousness. This phenomenon includes aspects such as the sense of owning a body (also known as body ownership) and h ...

In three experiments we investigated the effects of visuo-tactile and visuo-vestibular conflict about the direction of gravity on three aspects of bodily self-consciousness: self-identification, self-location, and the experienced direction of the first-per ...

Self-consciousness is the remarkable human experience of being a subject: the “I”. Self- consciousness is typically bound to a body, and particularly to the spatial dimensions of the body, as well as to its location and displacement in the gravitational fi ...

Self-consciousness is based on multisensory signals from the body. In full-body illusion (FBI) experiments, multisensory conflict was used to induce changes in three key aspects of bodily self-consciousness (BSC): self-identification (which body 'I' identi ...

Humans experience the self as localized within their body. This aspect of bodily self-consciousness can be experimentally manipulated by exposing individuals to conflicting multisensory input, or can be abnormal following focal brain injury. Recent technol ...

Recent research has investigated self-consciousness associated with the multisensory processing of bodily signals (e.g., somatosensory, visual, vestibular signals), a notion referred to as bodily self-consciousness, and these studies have shown that the ma ...

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via ...

A fundamental component of conscious experience involves a first-person perspective (1PP), characterized by the experience of being a subject and of being directed at the world. Extending earlier work on multisensory perceptual mechanisms of 1PP, we here a ...

How does the self relate to the body? Bodily self-consciousness, i.e. the sense of being a subject bound to a body, involves a first-person perspective (1PP), i.e. the sense of being directed at the world. Prior research suggests that bodily self-conscious ...

Bodily self-consciousness (BSC) refers to experience of one's self as located within an owned body (self-identification) and as occupying a specific location in space (self-location). BSC can be altered through multisensory stimulation, as in the Full Body ...

In non-human primates several brain areas contain neurons that respond to both vestibular and somatosensory stimulation. In humans, vestibular stimulation activates several somatosensory brain regions and improves tactile perception. However, less is known ...

Looking at one's own body has been shown to induce analgesia. In the present work we investigated whether illusory self-identification with an avatar, as induced experimentally through visuo-tactile stimulation, modulates the response to painful stimuli. I ...

Human-environment interactions are mediated through the body and occur within the peripersonal space (PPS), the space immediately adjacent to and surrounding the body. The PPS is taken to be a critical interface between the body and the environment, and in ...

Multisensory perception research has largely focused on exteroceptive signals, but recent evidence has revealed the integration of exteroceptive signals with interoceptive information. Such research revealed that heartbeat signals affect sensory (e.g., vis ...

Christian Pfeiffer

Chat with Graph Search

Multisensory Spatial Mechanisms of the Bodily Self and Social Cognition - A Commentary on Vittorio Gallese and Valentina Cuccio

Full body illusion is associated with widespread skin temperature reduction

Multisensory Origin of the Subjective First-Person Perspective: Visual, Tactile, and Vestibular Mechanisms

The vestibular system: a spatial reference for bodily self-consciousness

Visuospatial viewpoint manipulation during full-body illusion modulates subjective first-person perspective

Neuroscience robotics to investigate multisensory integration and bodily awareness

Transient Modulations of Neural Responses to Heartbeats Covary with Bodily Self-Consciousness

Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making

Visual gravity contributes to subjective first-person perspective

Vestibular contribution to bodily self-consciousness and multisensory cortical processing

Peripersonal space as the space of the bodily self

Distinct vestibular effects on early and late somatosensory cortical processing in humans

Illusory self-identification with an avatar reduces arousal responses to painful stimuli

Vestibular modulation of peripersonal space boundaries

Interoceptive signals impact visual processing: Cardiac modulation of visual body perception