
Bigna LenggenhagerUniversity of Konstanz | Uni-Konstanz · Department of Psychology
Bigna Lenggenhager
PhD.
About
171
Publications
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5,158
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2017 - August 2022
October 2010 - September 2011
August 2013 - January 2017
Education
July 2005 - September 2009
September 2000 - March 2005
Publications
Publications (171)
The sense of a bodily self is thought to depend on adaptive weighting and integration of bodily afferents and prior beliefs. While the physical body changes in shape, size, and functionality across the lifespan, the sense of body ownership remains relatively stable. Yet, little is known about how multimodal integration underlying such sense of owne...
Understanding the neural substrate of altered conscious states is an important cultural, scientific, and clinical endeavour. Although hypnosis causes strong shifts in conscious perception and cognition, it remains largely unclear how hypnosis affects information processing in cortical networks. Here we manipulated the depth of hypnotic states to st...
In Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) a profound incongruity between the physical body and the desired, i.e., amputated body, often leads to a desire for limb amputation. Virtual reality (VR) and multisensory stimulation paradigms provide powerful tools to create the experience of being embodied in an amputated body.
Here we investigate the impact of s...
Interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, is fundamental to our sense of self. Even though theoretical accounts suggest an important role for interoception in the development of the self, empirical investigations are limited, particularly in infancy. Previous studies used preferential-looking paradigms to assess the detection of sen...
An increasing amount of recent research has focused on the multisensory and neural bases of the bodily self. This pre-reflective form of self is considered as multifaceted, incorporating phenomenal components, such as self location, body ownership, first-person perspective, agency, and the perceptual body image. Direct electrical brain stimulation...
Embodied cognition research suggests a functional link between numerical and spatial cognition. Accordingly, numbers are assumed to be mentally represented on a “number line”, with smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right in Western culture. Supporting this, prior findings show a numerical lateralization effect, where participant...
Introduction
Fluctuations of chronic pain levels are determined by a complex interplay of cognitive, emotional and perceptual variables. We introduce a pain tracking platform composed of wearable neurotechnology and a smartphone application to measure and predict chronic pain levels and its interplay with other dimensions of experience.
Methods
Ou...
Introduction
Current evidence indicates a modulating role of respiratory processes in cardiac interoception, yet whether altered breathing patterns influence heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP) remains inconclusive.
Methods
Here, we examined the effects of voluntary hyperventilation (VH) as part of a clinical routine examination on scalp-recorded HE...
It has been shown that observing a face being touched or moving in synchrony with our own face increases self-identification with the former which might alter both cognitive and affective processes. The induction of this phenomenon, termed enfacement illusion, has often relied on laboratory tools that are unavailable to a large audience. However, d...
Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by fundamental alterations to the sense of self that include feelings of detachment and estrangement from one’s body. We conducted an online study in healthy participants (n=514) with DP traits to investigate and quantify the subjective experience of body and self during waking and dreaming, as the vast major...
Dissociation is a transdiagnostic mental health symptom involving a sense of detachment from one’s own body. A coherent percept of our body relies upon the smooth integration of different senses, such as vision and touch, which are processed by the brain at different speeds. In a N=100 non-clinical sample, we used Virtual Reality to investigate sen...
Fluctuations of chronic pain levels are determined by a complex interplay of cognitive, emotional and perceptual variables. We introduce a pain tracking platform composed of wearable neurotechnology and a smartphone application to measure and predict chronic pain levels. Our method measures, dynamically, pain strength, phenomenal and neural time se...
It is a popular belief that colours impact one's psychological and affective functioning. However, clear-cut scientific evidence is still lacking, largely due to methodological challenges. Virtual reality (VR) enabled us to control and modify the environment. We exposed 60 participants to red or blue environments varying in lightness and saturation...
Understanding the neural substrate of altered conscious states is an important cultural, scientific and clinical endeavour. Although hypnosis causes strong shifts in conscious perception and cognition, it remains largely unclear how hypnosis affects information processing in cortical networks. Here we manipulated the depth of hypnotic states to stu...
Our interaction with the world rests on the knowledge that we are a body in space and time, which can interact with the environment. This awareness is usually referred to as sense of embodiment. For the good part of the past 30 years, the rubber hand illusion (RHI) has been a prime tool to study embodiment in healthy and people with a variety of cl...
Although predicted by the notion of embodied morality, it remains unknown whether a reduced sense of body ownership (SoO) is associated with increased or decreased dishonesty. To clarify this issue, we tested patients with body integrity dysphoria (BID), a clinical condition characterized by chronic reductions of SoO toward one leg that patients pe...
The peripersonal space, that is, the limited space surrounding the body, involves multisensory coding and representation of the self in space. Previous studies have shown that peripersonal space representation and the visual perspective on the environment can be dramatically altered when neurotypical individuals self-identify with a distant avatar...
Electroencephalography (EEG) studies of dreaming are an integral paradigm in the study of neurocognitive processes of human sleep and consciousness, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream studies also involve substantial methodological and conceptual variability which poses problems for the integra...
Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by fundamental alterations to the sense of self that include feelings of detachment and estrangement from one's body. We conducted an online study in healthy participants (n=514) with DP traits to investigate and quantify the subjective experience of body and self during waking and dreaming, as the vast major...
Although predicted by the notion of embodied morality, evidence for a link between bodily representations and (dis)honest choices remains inconclusive. In specific, it remains unknown whether a reduced Sense of body Ownership (SoO) is associated with increased dishonesty or vice versa. To cast light on this controversial issue, we tested patients w...
Current evidence indicates a modulating role of respiratory processes in cardiac interoception, yet whether altered breathing patterns can influence heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEP) remains inconclusive. Here, we examined the effects of voluntary hyperventilation (VH) on scalp-recorded HEPs in epilepsy patients (N = 80). Using cluster-based permut...
There is a constant reciprocal flow of information between the malleable sensorimotor states of the body and cognitive functions, and some embodied cognition approaches argue that many cognitive-affective mechanisms depend on the physical characteristics of the body. To examine such influences of bodily state, the current study compared patients wi...
Conflicting multisensory signals may alter embodiment to produce self-identification with a foreign body, but the role of olfaction in this process has been overlooked. We studied in healthy participants how sex (male and female sweat odors) and gender (male and female cosmetic scents) olfactory stimuli contribute to embodiment. Participants saw, o...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) constitute a specific alteration of self-consciousness, where people experience their center of awareness as located outside of their physical body, and perceive themselves and the environment from an extracorporeal perspective. While initial parapsychological fascination focused on their mythical significance, OBEs h...
In body integrity dysphoria (BID), otherwise healthy individuals feel like a part of their physical body does not belong to them despite normal sensorimotor functioning. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggested a weakened integration of the affected body part into higher-order multisensory cortical body networks. Here, we used a multisensory st...
Despite advances and research in the area of teleoperation (e.g. (1-3)) over the last decades and the
development of active exoskeletons that provide force feedback to the human for a transparent and
intuitive interaction (4), it is still challenging to measure the subjective transparency of a
teleoperation system. But this information is of high i...
A target question for the scientific study of consciousness is how dimensions of consciousness, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure or reflect on one’s own experience, vary in different states and animal species. Considering the tight link between consciousness and moral status, answers to these questions have implications for law and eth...
In this study, we recreate the Pinocchio Illusion—a bodily illusion whereby the perceived length of one’s nose is extended—in Virtual Reality. Participants (n = 38) self-administered tapping on the tip of the nose of a virtual avatar seen from the first-person perspective (using a hand-held controller) while the nose of the avatar slowly grew with...
“Body integrity dysphoria" (BID) is a severe condition affecting non-psychotic individuals. In the amputation variant of BID a limb may be experienced as not being part of the body, despite normal anatomical development and intact sensorimotor functions. We previously demonstrated altered brain structural (gray matter) and functional connectivity i...
Acute and chronic states of physical pain are inherently linked to our bodily perception. Bodily illusion paradigms have demonstrated that an experimentally induced sense of body disownership can modulate both acute and chronic pain. Insight into the relationship between enduring clinical alterations in body perception and pain is much more limited...
Traditionally, robotics and psychology have little to share; at least, if we think of robotics as an endeavor to build machines able to autonomously perform tasks that are undesirable or impossible for human beings. Nevertheless, besides addressing safety requirements for close physical interaction, which are tackled by approaches like soft robotic...
Bodily sensation mapping (BSM) is a recently developed self-report tool for the assessment of emotions in which people draw their sensations of activation in a body silhouette. Following the circumplex model of affect, activity and valence are the underling dimensions of every emotional experience. The aim of this study was to introduce the neglect...
Interoception, the perception of internal bodily signals, is fundamental to our sense of self. Even though theoretical accounts suggest an important role for interoception in the development of the self, empirical investigations are limited, in particular, in infancy. Previous studies used preferential-looking paradigms to assess the detection of s...
In a common variant of body integrity dysphoria (BID), otherwise healthy individuals feel like a part of their physical body does not belong to them despite normal sensorimotor functioning, often leading to the desire of amputation for the affected body part. While underlying mechanisms are far from understood, theoretical and empirical evidence su...
Recent behavioral evidence from a virtual reality (VR) study indicates that awake sleepwalkers show dissociation of motor control and motor awareness. This dissociation resembles the nocturnal disintegration of motor awareness and movement during episodes of sleepwalking. Here, we set out to examine the neural underpinnings of altered motor awarene...
Research has shown that conflicting multisensory signals may alter embodiment to the point of self-identifying with a foreign body, but the role of olfaction in this process has been overlooked. Here, we study in healthy participants how sex (male and female sweat odors) and gender (male and female cosmetic scents) olfactory stimuli contribute to e...
Pain represents an embodied experience, wherein inferences are not only drawn from external sensory inputs, but also from bodily states. Previous research has demonstrated that a placebo administered to an embodied rubber hand can effectively induce analgesia, providing first evidence that placebos can work even when applied to temporarily embodied...
The sense of a bodily self is thought to depend on adaptive weighting and integration of bodily afferents and prior beliefs. Evidence from studies using paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion and full body illusion suggests changes in the integration of visuotactile bodily signals throughout childhood. Here, we extended this line of research by...
During autoscopic phenomena, people perceive a double of themselves in extrapersonal space. Such clinical allocentric self-experiences sometimes co-occur with auditory hallucinations, yet experimental setups to induce similar illusions in healthy participants have generally neglected acoustic cues. We investigated whether feeling the presence of an...
Introduction:
Increased efforts in neuroscience try to understand mental disorders as brain disorders. In the present study, we investigate how common a neuroreductionist inclination is among highly educated people. In particular, we shed light on implicit presuppositions of mental disorders little is known about in the public, exemplified here by...
Self-touch is considered important for bodily self-consciousness and self-other distinction and has been reported to improve clinical symptoms of disembodiment. To investigate the link between self-touch and disembodiment in healthy participants, we studied the effect of self-touch versus touch produced by another person (other-touch) on experiment...
Limb apparent motion perception (LAMP) refers to the illusory visual perception of a moving limb upon observing two rapidly alternating photographs depicting the same limb in two different postures. Fast stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) induce the more visually guided perception of physically impossible movements. Slow SOAs induce the perception...
Body integrity dysphoria (BID) is a severe condition affecting non-psychotic individuals where a limb may be experienced as non-belonging, despite normal anatomical development and intact sensorimotor functions. Limb amputation is desired for restoring their own identity. We previously demonstrated altered brain structural (gray matter) and functio...
Patients suffering from body integrity dysphoria (BID) desire to become disabled, arising from a mismatch between the desired body and the physical body. We focus here on the most common variant, characterized by the desire for amputation of a healthy limb. In most reported cases, amputation of the rejected limb entirely alleviates the distress of...
Mounting evidence has demonstrated that embodied virtual reality, during which physical bodies are replaced with virtual surrogates, can strongly alter cognition and behavior even when the virtual body radically differs from one’s own. One particular emergent area of interest is the investigation of how virtual gender swaps can influence choice beh...
It is well established that vision, and in particular color, may modulate our experience of flavor. Such cross-modal correspondences have been argued to be bilateral, in the sense that one modality can modulate the other and vice versa. However, the amount of literature assessing how vision modulates flavor is remarkably larger than that directly a...
The sense of our body is fundamental to human self-consciousness. Many neurological and psychiatric disorders involve atypical corporeal awareness with symptomatology that might be very heterogeneous, affecting various aspects of the bodily self. A common dichotomy divides disorders of the bodily self into disorders affecting predominantly the body...
Self-touch is considered important for bodily self-consciousness and self-other distinction and has been reported to improve clinical symptoms of disembodiment. To investigate the link between self-touch and disembodiment in healthy participants, we studied the effect of self-touch versus touch produced by another person (other-touch) on experiment...
Patients suffering from Body Integrity Dysphoria (BID) desire to become disabled, arising from a mismatch between the desired body and the physical body. We focus here on the most common variant, characterised by the desire for amputation of a healthy limb. In most reported cases amputation of the rejected limb entirely alleviates the distress of t...
Limb apparent motion perception (LAMP) refers to the illusory visual perception of a moving limb upon observing two rapidly alternating photographs depicting the same limb in two different postures. Fast stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) induce the more visually guided perception of physically impossible movements. Slow SOAs induce the perception...
Bodily sensation mapping (BSM) is a recently developed self-report tool for the assessment of emotions in which people draw their sensations of activation in a body silhouette. Following the circumplex model of affect, activity and valence are the underling dimensions of every emotional experience. The aim of this study was to introduce the neglect...
Sensory attenuation of self-touch, that is, the perceptual reduction of self-generated tactile stimuli, is considered a neurocognitive basis for self-other distinction. However, whether this effect can also be found in upper limb amputees using a prosthesis is unknown. Thirteen participants were asked to touch their foot sole with a) their intact h...
Pain represents an embodied process, wherein inferences are not only drawn from sensory inputs, but also from bodily states. Previous research has demonstrated that a placebo administered to an embodied rubber hand can effectively induce analgesia, providing first evidence that placebos can work even when applied to temporarily embodied, artificial...
The sense of a bodily self is thought to depend on adaptive weighting and integration of bodily afferents and prior beliefs. Evidence from studies using paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion and full body illusion suggests changes in the integration of visuotactile bodily signals throughout childhood. Here, we extended this line of research by...
Recent behavioral evidence indicates that awake sleepwalkers show dissociation of motor control and motor awareness in a virtual reality (VR) paradigm. Intriguingly, this dissociation resembles the nocturnal disintegration of motor awareness and movement during
episodes of sleepwalking. Here, we set out to examine the neural underpinnings of altere...
Flavour is one of the best-known examples of multi-modal perception. Recent advances in and democratization of virtual reality has further stimulated research on cross modulations, however, gustatory cues have been vastly disregarded. We investigated bidirectional modulation of color and flavour perception using mismatching visuogustatory stimuli i...
There are tight functional and anatomical links between the vestibular and interoceptive systems, and both systems have shown to fundamentally underlie emotional processes and our sense of a bodily self. Yet, nothing is known about how long-term bilateral vestibulopathy (BVP) influences interoception and its relation to embodiment and the sense of...
To allow users to perform real walking in a virtual environment larger than the physical space, redirected walking (RDW) techniques could be employed. Users do not notice this manipulation and immersion remains intact when RDW is applied within certain thresholds. Although many studies on RDW detection thresholds exists, in none of these studies, u...
Wearable robots (WRs) are increasingly moving out of the labs towards real-world applications. In order for WRs to be effectively and widely adopted by end-users, a common benchmarking framework needs to be established. In this article, we outline the perspectives that in our opinion are the main determinants of this endeavour, and exemplify the co...
Redirected walking (RDW) allows users to explore a virtual Environment larger than the physical tracking space by real walking. When RDWis applied within certain thresholds, users do not notice it and remain immersed in the virtual environment. There are many factors that affect these thresholds such as walking speed, gender, and field of view. How...
During autoscopic phenomena, people perceive a double of themselves in extrapersonal space. Such clinical allocentric self-experiences often co-occur with auditory hallucinations, yet experimental setups to induce similar illusions in healthy participants have been limited to visual doubles. We investigated whether feeling the presence of an audito...
The phenomenon of sensory attenuation, that is, the perceptual reduction of intensity for self-generated stimuli, is considered a neurocognitive basis for self-other distinction. Corroboratory, such perceptual attenuation has been shown to be dependent on the sense of embodiment, that is, the perceptual incorporation of an object or body part into...
Virtual reality (VR) protocols inducing illusory embodiment of avatars have shown a positive impact on participants’ perception of outgroup members, in line with the idea that the simulation of another’s sensorimotor states might underlie prosocial behavior. These studies, however, have been mostly confined to laboratory settings with student popul...
Bodily self-identification has shown to be easily altered through spatiotemporally congruent multimodal signals. While such manipulations are mostly studied through visuo-tactile or visuo-motor stimulation, here we investigated whether congruent visuo-olfactory cues might enhance illusory self-identification with an arbitrary object. Using virtual...
Increased efforts in neuroscience try to understand mental disorders as brain disorders. In the present study we investigate how common a neuroreductionist inclination is in the popular mind. Identically graphed, simulated data of mind-brain correlations were shown in three contexts with presumably different presumptions about causality. 738 highly...
Third-person perspective full-body illusions (3PP-FBI) enable the manipulation, through multisensory stimulation, of perceived self-location. Perceived self-location is classically measured by a locomotion task. Yet, as locomotion modulates various sensory signals, we developed in immersive virtual reality a measure of self-location without locomot...