Tahnée Engelen

Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris | ENS · Département d'Etudes Cognitives

In the complete absence of small transients in visual inputs (e.g. by experimentally stabilizing an image on the retina, or in everyday life during intent staring), information perceived by the eyes will fade from the perceptual experience. While the mechanisms of visual fading remain poorly understood, one possibility is that higher-level brain re...

Expressions of emotion are powerful triggers for situation-appropriate responses by the observer. Of particular interest regarding the preparation of such adaptive actions are parietal and premotor cortices, given their potential for interaction with the amygdala (AMG), which is known to play a crucial role in the processing of affective informatio...

The observation of threatening expression in others is a strong cue for triggering an action response. One method of capturing such action responses is by measuring the amplitude of Motor Evoked Potentials (MEPs) elicited with single pulse TMS over the primary motor cortex. Indeed, it has been shown that viewing whole body expressions of threat mod...

Social threat requires fast adaptive reactions. One prominent threat-coping behavior present in both humans and other species is freezing, of which heart rate deceleration and reduced postural mobility are two key components. Previous studies mostly focused on freezing reactions in rodents, but now virtual reality offers unique possibilities for co...

Social threat requires fast adaptive reactions. One prominent threat-coping behavior present in humans is freezing, of which heart rate deceleration and reduced postural mobility are two key components. Previous studies focused mainly on freezing reactions in rodents, but now virtual reality offers unique possibilities for controlled and ecological...

The field of emotion has a rich history, yet reaching a consensus on critical questions such as ‘what is an emotion’ has proven difficult. The current paper focuses on one of the main topics of disagreement, namely the role of conscious feelings in emotion and their neural correlates. We identify theoretical and methodological limitations which nee...

In the complete absence of small transients in visual inputs (e.g., by experimentally stabilizing an image on the retina or in everyday life during intent staring), information perceived by the eyes will fade from the perceptual experience. Although the mechanisms of visual fading remain poorly understood, one possibility is that higher level brain...

The continuous flash suppression (CFS) paradigm is increasingly used in consciousness research, but its mechanisms are still not fully understood. To better understand its temporal properties, we presented the CFS masks at 9 frequencies, and examined their influence on stimuli visibility, while taking into account the inter-individual variability a...

In the natural world, faces are not isolated objects but are rather encountered in the context of the whole body. Previous work has studied the perception of combined faces and bodies using behavioural and electrophysiological measurements, but the neural correlates of emotional face-body perception still remain unexplored. Here, we combined happy...

Emotional signals, like threatening sounds, automatically ready the perceiver to prepare an appropriate defense behavior. Conjecturing that this would manifest itself in extending the safety zone around the body we used the rubber hand illusion (RHI) to test this prediction. The RHI is a perceptual illusion in which body ownership is manipulated by...

Introduction The perception of emotion stimuli in the environment prepares our bodies for action, and especially when confronted with whole body expressions of an emotion like anger, action-related areas in the brain are triggered. Previously, parietal dorsal stream and premotor areas have been linked as crucial areas for processing of such stimuli...