Konstantina Kilteni

Radboud University | RU · Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour

In recent decades, research on somatosensory perception has led to two important observations. First, self-generated touches that are predicted by voluntary movements become attenuated compared to externally generated touches of the same intensity (attenuation). Second, externally generated touches feel weaker and are more difficult to detect durin...

The brain predicts the sensory consequences of our movements and uses these predictions to attenuate the perception of self-generated sensations. Accordingly, self-generated touch feels weaker than an externally generated touch of identical intensity. In schizophrenia, this somatosensory attenuation is substantially reduced, suggesting that patient...

Self-generated touch feels less intense (and less ticklish) than an externally generated touch of the same intensity. Since the early 1970s, researchers in somatosensation sought to understand the origins and the principles of this phenomenon. This chapter will focus on two methods of studying the perceived intensity of self-generated touch in rela...

Dominant motor control theories propose that the brain uses efferent information to predict and attenuate the somatosensory consequences of actions, referred to as sensory attenuation. Support for this model comes from psychophysical and neuroimaging studies showing that touch applied on a passive hand elicits attenuated perceptual and neural respo...

Intrinsic delays in sensory feedback can be detrimental for motor control. As a compensation strategy, the brain predicts the sensory consequences of movement via a forward model on the basis of a copy of the motor command. Using these predictions, the brain attenuates somatosensory reafference to facilitate the processing of exafferent information...

Touch generated by our voluntary movements is attenuated both at the perceptual and neural level compared to touch of the same intensity delivered to our body by another person or machine. This somatosensory attenuation phenomenon relies on the integration of somatosensory input and predictions about the somatosensory consequences of our actions. P...

Touch generated by our voluntary movements is attenuated both at the perceptual and neural level compared to touch of the same intensity delivered to our body by another person or machine. This somatosensory attenuation phenomenon relies on the integration of somatosensory input and predictions about the somatosensory consequences of our actions. P...

Intrinsic delays in sensory feedback can be detrimental for motor control. As a compensation strategy, the brain predicts the sensory consequences of movement via a forward model on the basis of a copy of the motor command. Using these predictions, the brain attenuates the somatosensory reafference to facilitate the processing of exafferent informa...

The brain predicts the sensory consequences of our movements and uses these predictions to attenuate the perception of self-generated sensations. Accordingly, self-generated touch feels weaker than externally generated touch of identical intensity. In schizophrenia, this somatosensory attenuation is substantially reduced, suggesting that patients w...

The 30th meeting of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement (NCM) was originally scheduled to take place in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April of 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the in-person meeting was canceled and replaced by a virtual symposium showcasing the work of the society’s 2020 scholarship winners. By the spring of 2021 (April 20th...

The discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque brain in the 1990s triggered investigations on putative human mirror neurons and their potential functionality. The leading proposed function has been action understanding: accordingly, we understand the actions of others by ‘simulating’ them in our own motor system through a direct matching of the vis...

The discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque brain in the 1990s triggered investigations on putative human mirror neurons and their potential functionality. The leading proposed function has been action understanding: accordingly, we understand the actions of others by simulating them in our own motor system through a direct matching of the visua...

During self-induced pain, a copy of the motor information from the body's own movement may help predict the painful sensation and cause down-regulation of pain. This phenomenon, called sensory attenuation, enables the distinction between self-produced stimuli versus stimuli produced by others. Sensory attenuation has been shown to occur also during...

In recent decades, research on somatosensory perception has led to two important observations. First, self-generated touches that are predicted by voluntary movements become attenuated compared to externally generated touches of the same intensity (attenuation). Second, externally generated touches feel weaker and are more difficult to detect durin...

In recent decades, research on somatosensory perception has led to two important observations. First, self-generated touches that are predicted by voluntary movements become attenuated compared to externally generated touches of the same intensity (attenuation). Second, externally generated touches feel weaker and are more difficult to detect durin...

Since the early 1970s, numerous behavioral studies have shown that self-generated touch feels less intense than the same touch applied externally. Computational motor control theories have suggested that cerebellar internal models predict the somatosensory consequences of our movements and that these predictions attenuate the perception of the actu...

Self-generated touch feels less intense than external touch of the same intensity. According to theory, this is because the brain predicts and attenuates the somatosensory consequences of our movements using a copy of the motor command, i.e., the efference copy. However, whether the efference copy is necessary for this somatosensory attenuation is...

Self-generated touch feels less intense and less ticklish than identical externally generated touch. This somatosensory attenuation occurs because the brain predicts the tactile consequences of our self-generated movements. To produce attenuation, the tactile predictions need to be time-locked to the movement, but how the brain maintains this tempo...

Since the early 1970s, numerous behavioral studies have shown that self-generated touch feels less intense than the same touch applied externally. Computational motor control theories have suggested that cerebellar internal models predict the somatosensory consequences of our movements and that these predictions attenuate the perception of the actu...

A self-generated touch feels less intense than an external touch of the exact same intensity. According to a prevalent computational theory of motor control, this attenuation occurs because the brain uses internal forward models to predict the somatosensory consequences of our movements using a copy of the motor command, i.e., the efference copy. T...

Self-generated touch feels less intense and less ticklish than identical externally generated touch. This somatosensory attenuation occurs because the brain predicts the tactile consequences of our self-generated movements. To produce attenuation, the tactile predictions need to be time-locked to the movement, but how the brain maintains this tempo...

1. Executive Summary This survey and data analysis were conducted by the European Network of Postdoctoral Associations (ENPA) with the aim of assessing the current research and work conditions, aspirations and support received by postdoctoral researchers working in Europe. The Results section is structured into three main parts. The first one desc...

When we successfully achieve willed actions, the feeling that our moving body parts belong to the self (i.e., body ownership) is barely required. However, how and to what extent the awareness of our own body contributes to the neurocognitive processes subserving actions is still debated. Here we capitalized on immersive virtual reality in order to...

Research on motor imagery has identified many similarities between imagined and executed actions at the behavioral, physiological and neural levels, thus supporting their “functional equivalence”. In contrast, little is known about their possible “computational equivalence”—specifically, whether the brain’s internal forward models predict the senso...

Human survival requires quick and accurate movements, both with and without tools. To overcome the sensorimotor delays and noise, the brain uses internal forward models to predict the sensory consequences of an action. Here, we investigated whether these sensory predictions are computed similarly for actions involving hand-held tools and natural ha...

Significance When we touch one hand with the other, the touch feels less intense than identical touches generated by another person or robot. This is because our brain predicts the contact between our hands and attenuates the expected sensation. Here, we describe how the attenuation of self-touch depends on the experienced ownership of the touching...

Experimental work on body ownership illusions showed how simple multisensory manipulation can generate the illusory experience of an artificial limb as being part of the own-body. This work highlighted how own-body perception relies on a plastic brain representation emerging from multisensory integration. The flexibility of this representation is r...

Agency, the attribution of authorship to an action of our body, requires the intention to carry out the action, and subsequently a match between its predicted and actual sensory consequences. However, illusory agency can be generated through priming of the action together with perception of bodily action, even when there has been no actual correspo...

Previous studies on body ownership illusions have shown that under certain multimodal conditions, healthy people can experience artificial body-parts as if they were part of their own body, with direct physiological consequences for the real limb that gets 'substituted.' In this study we wanted to assess (a) whether healthy people can experience 'm...

In immersive virtual reality (IVR) it is possible to replace a person's real body by a life-sized virtual body that is seen from first person perspective to visually substitute their own. Multisensory feedback from the virtual to the real body (such as the correspondence of touch and also movement) can also be present. Under these conditions partic...

The feeling of â € ownershipâ € over an external dummy/virtual body (or body part) has been proven to have both physiological and behavioural consequences. For instance, the vision of an â € embodiedâ € dummy or virtual body can modulate pain perception. However, the impact of partial or total invisibility of the body on physiology and behaviour ha...

Which is my body and how do I distinguish it from the bodies of others, or from objects in the surrounding environment? The perception of our own body and more particularly our sense of body ownership is taken for granted. Nevertheless, experimental findings from body ownership illusions (BOIs), show that under specific multisensory conditions, we...

Advances in computer graphics algorithms and virtual reality (VR) systems, together with the reduction in cost of associated equipment, have led scientists to consider VR as a useful tool for conducting experimental studies in fields such as neuroscience and experimental psychology. In particular virtual body ownership, where the feeling of ownersh...

Our vision is that regardless of future variations in the interior of airplane cabins, we can utilize ever-advancing state-of-the-art virtual and mixed reality technologies with the latest research in neuroscience and psychology to achieve high levels of comfort for passengers. Current surveys on passenger's experience during air travel reveal that...

It has been shown that it is possible to generate perceptual illusions of ownership in immersive virtual reality (IVR) over a virtual body seen from first person perspective, in other words over a body that visually substitutes the personʼs real body. This can occur even when the virtual body is quite different in appearance from the personʼs rea...

What does it feel like to own, to control, and to be inside a body? The multidimensional nature of this experience together with the continuous presence of one's biological body, render both theoretical and experimental approaches problematic. Nevertheless, exploitation of immersive virtual reality has allowed a reframing of this question to whethe...

Recent studies have shown that a fake body part can be incorporated into human body representation through synchronous multisensory stimulation on the fake and corresponding real body part - the most famous example being the Rubber Hand Illusion. However, the extent to which gross asymmetries in the fake body can be assimilated remains unknown. Par...

Equipment Details. (PDF)

Post Experiment Ethics Check. (PDF)

Regression Analysis for Saw Time Dispersion log(LS). (PDF)

Drift and Discrepancy in Real and Virtual Hand Conditions. (PDF)

Highlights from the Experiment. This video illustrates the major parts of the experiment. (MP4)