Pawel Tacikowski

Karolinska Institutet | KI · Department of Neuroscience

Gender identity is a collection of thoughts and feelings about one’s own gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth. How this sense is linked to the perception of one’s own masculine or feminine body remains unclear. Here, in a series of three behavioral experiments conducted on a large group of control volunteers (N = 140...

How does our body affect the way we think about our personality? We addressed this question by eliciting the perceptual illusion that pairs of friends swapped bodies with each other. We found that during the illusion, the participants rated their own personality characteristics more similarly to the way they previously rated their friend's personal...

Gender identity is the inner sense of being male, female, both, or neither. How this sense is linked to the perception of one's own masculine or feminine body remains unclear. Here, in a series of three behavioral experiments conducted on a large group of healthy volunteers (N=140), we show that a perceptual illusion of having the opposite-sex body...

Conceptual self-awareness is a mental state in which the content of one's consciousness refers to a particular aspect of semantic knowledge about oneself. This form of consciousness plays a crucial role in shaping human behavior; however, little is known about its neural basis. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a visual...

Background Impaired orienting to social stimuli is one of the core early symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, in contrast to faces, name processing has rarely been studied in individuals with ASD. Here, we investigated brain activity and functional connectivity associated with recognition of names in the high-functioning ASD group a...

Goal-directed mental processes focused on oneself often co-occur with goal-directed mental processes focused on other people or objects. However, little is known about the mechanisms of this fundamental type of cognitive interaction. The aim of this study was to determine the degree of cognitive interference associated with self-related processing...

Self-related stimuli, such as one’s own name or face, are processed faster and more accurately than other types of stimuli. However, what remains unknown is at which stage of the information processing hierarchy this preferential processing occurs. Our first aim was to determine whether preferential self-processing involves mainly perceptual stages...

One's own name seems to have a special status in the processing of incoming information. In event-related potential (ERP) studies this preferential status has mainly been associated with higher P300 to one's own name than to other names. Some studies showed preferential responses to own name even for earlier ERP components. However, instead of just...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental condition clinically characterized by social interaction and communication difficulties. To date, the majority of research efforts have focused on brain mechanisms underlying the deficits in interpersonal social cognition associated with ASD. Recent empirical and theoretical work...

Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that the patterns of brain activity during the processing of personally relevant names (e.g., own name, friend's name, partner's name, etc.) and the names of famous people (e.g., celebrities) are different. However, it is not known how the activity in this network is influenced by the modality of the present...

In adults, the onset of coherent motion compared to random motion in a random dot kinematogram leads to a right hemispheric amplitude advantage of the N2 response. The source of this asymmetry is believed to lie in the motion selective MT+ cortex. Here, we tested whether the right tempo-parietal N2 component shows a similar regularity in children....

Strong evidence suggests that memory for emotional information is much better than for neutral one. Thus, one may expect that forgetting of emotional information is difficult and requires considerable effort. The aim of this item-method directed forgetting functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate this hypothesis both at behavi...

Our own name, due to its high social relevance, is supposed to have a unique status in our information processing. However, demonstrating this phenomenon empirically proves difficult as famous and unknown names, to which self-name is often compared in the studies, may differ from self-name not only in terms of the 'me vs. not-me' distinction, but a...

Because we live in an extremely complex social environment, people require the ability to memorize hundreds or thousands of social stimuli. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of multiple repetitions on the processing of names and faces varying in terms of pre-experimental familiarity. We measured both behavioral and electrophysiolo...

Dyslexia is characterized by a core phonological deficit, although recent studies indicate that semantic impairment also contributes to this condition. In this study, event-related potentials (ERP) were used to examine whether the N400 wave in dyslexic children is modulated by phonological or semantic priming, similarly to age-matched controls. ERP...

Self-related information, due to its high social/adaptive value, seems to have a preferential access to our attentional resources (cf. the cocktail party effect). However, it remains uncertain whether this attention preference is the same for different kinds of self-related cues. In this ERP study we showed that self-name and self-face when compare...

The corpus callosum is the largest commissure in the brain and acts as a "bridge" of nerve fibres connecting the two cerebral hemispheres. It plays a crucial role in interhemispheric integration and is responsible for normal communication and cooperation between the two hemispheres. Evolutionary pressures guiding brain size are accompanied by reduc...

Defining “self” and understanding the cortical underpinnings of this concept is a challenge for neuroscience. Self-recognition - one of the indicators of higher-order self-awareness – may be based on either concrete (images of one’s own face) or symbolic (one´s own first and last name) cues. Studying the recognition of one’s own vs. other names and...