Abstract How do we distinguish self-touches (e.g., feeling our hand caressing our leg) from touches caused by external sources (e.g., feeling an insect on our leg) to generate the appropriate behavior? While this distinction might seem trivial, it presents a demanding task for the brain, given the vast amount of somatosensory information it must process at any given moment. Dominant motor control theories suggest that cerebellar internal models predict somatosensory reafference and attenuate, or even cancel, the perception of self-touches, thereby increasing the salience of externally generated touches. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of our work on somatosensory attenuation, focusing on when these predictive processes are engaged and how they are implemented in the brain. Biosketch Konstantina Kilteni studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens and completed her PhD studies in Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Barcelona. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet. She is currently an Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and the Department of Sensorimotor Neuroscience at the Donders Institute. Her two labs are funded by starting grants from the Swedish and European Research Councils, respectively.
Organizer
Patrick Forbes
p.forbes@erasmusmc.nl