Conference and doctoral workshop organized by Patrick Haggard (UCL, Paris IAS fellow), and Frédérique de Vignemont (CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod), with the support of the École Normale Supérieure.

The conference and workshop will be held at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (Hôtel de Lauzun) on Monday, October 10^th, and the conference will continue at the École Normale Supérieure (29, rue d'Ulm) on Tuesday, October 11^th.

Presentation

Bodily sensation is a key component of self-awareness, but the cognitive and neural processes that transform specific sensory inputs into a general sense of one’s own body are scarcely understood.  At this meeting, experts in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy of the body will focus on how the brain integrates sensory inputs into a coherent representation of one’s own body.  In addition to considering perceptual and neurophysiological data, the meeting will cover conceptual work assessing how integrative somatosensory and motor processing might contribute to the sense of self, and what kind of self might result from such mechanisms.

Program

Monday 10th
Institut d'études avancées de Paris,
17 Quai d'Anjou, 75004

09.30  Registration/coffee

Chair : Frédérique de Vignemont

09.55  Welcoming remarks

10.00  Catherine Tallon-Baudry, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, ENS
« Visceral inputs, brain dynamics & subjectivity »

11.00  Mariana Babo-Rebelo, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, ENS
« Neural responses to heartbeats encode the self in spontaneous thoughts »

11.15  Coffee break

11.30  Luigi Tame, Psychology department, Birkbeck College
« Modulatory Effects on Structural Body Representations »

11.45  Manolo Martinez, Philosophy department, University of Barcelona
« What does reward represent? »

12.45  Brianna Beck, Department of Neuroscience, UCL
« Pain, action, and the sense of agency »

13.00  Lunch

Chair : Patrick Haggard

14.30  Flavia Mancini, Department of Neuroscience, UCL
« Making sense of where it hurts: spatial coding of nociceptive input »

15.30  Giandomenico Iannetti et Rory Bufacchi, Department of Neuroscience, UCL
« Characterising peripersonal space with behavioural geometry »

16.30  Coffee break

17.00  Or Yizhar, The Cognitive Science Program, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
« Posture influences spatial perception of tactile temporal stimuli on inner arm »

17.15  Frédérique de Vignemont, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS
« The spatiality of pain and touch : how different? »

18.15  End of the day

Tuesday 11th
Département d'Études Cognitives
École Normale Supérieure
Salle Langevin
29 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris

Chair : Frédérique de Vignemont

9.00  Patrick Haggard, IEA Paris / Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL
« Three levels of somatosensory spatial organisation »

10.00  Matt Longo, Psychology department, Birkbeck College
« Body Representations in 2D and 3D »

11.00  Coffee break

11.15  Elena Azanon, Psychology department, Birkbeck College
«Tactile distance as a basic somatosensory feature »

11.30  Vincent Hayward, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, UPMC
« Coding body-world interactions through mechanical invariants »

12.30  Lunch

Chair : Frédérique de Vignemont

14.00  Jessica Hartcher-O’Brien, Laboratoire d'informatique de Paris 6, UPMC
« The mind's perspective on touch is not arbitrary »

14.15  Alessandro Farne, Centre de recherches en neurosciences de Lyon, Inserm
« Touch here touch there: Tactile interference and facilitation across body parts »

15.15  Luke Miller, Centre de recherches en neurosciences de Lyon, Inserm
« Feeling touch on a hand-held object »

15.30  Coffee break

16.00  Zohar Tal, Department of Medical Neurobiology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
« Topographic characteristics of somatosensory perception, imagery and multisensory body processing »

16.15  Amir Amedi, Department of Medical Neurobiology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
« An alternative view of 'visual' cortex organization and its dependence on visual experience and visual input »

17.15  End of meeting