LABORATORY OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE (LNCO) and the Neural Correlates of Self Consciousness

Research at the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (located in Lausanne overlooking Lake of Geneva and French Alps) is carried out by a multidisciplinary team of biologists, psychologists, medical doctors, physicists, engineers and computer scientists. We focus our investigations on the functional and neural mechanisms of body perception, corporeal awareness, and self consciousness. Projects rely on the investigation of healthy subjects as well as neurological patients (that suffer from selective neurocognitive deficits and illusions) by combining psychophysical and cognitive paradigms with state of the art neuroimaging techniques such as intracranial EEG, surface EEG, fMRI, and Virtual Reality. Our main goals are to develop neuroscientific models of body perception, corporeal awareness, and self consciousness by linking complex phenomenological experience of body and self to brain mechanisms of multisensory corporeal perception (vestibular, visual, proprioceptive, and tactile information).
Lab facilities include 256,192-channel EEG platforms and a Virtual-Reality EEG platform allowing to record from 256 scalp electrodes during full immersion in Virtual Reality. Several research MRI facilities are in walking distance on campus at the Biomedical Imaging Center at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Lausanne University Hospital. In close collaboration with the Department of Neurology (University Hospital of Geneva) we investigate several neurological conditions relevant to body perception, corporeal awareness, and self consciousness: illusory own body perceptions (out-of-body experiences, autoscopy), disturbed own body recognition (feeling-of-a presence, paranoia, asomatognosia, somatoparaphrenia), mental imagery deficits, visual and auditory disturbances and agnosias (motion blindness, motion deafness), and visuo-spatial and attentional deficits (neglect, extinction, alloesthesia).