Conférence CRNL Konstantina Kilteni "Self-touch versus externally generated touch: how action influences somatosensory perception"

How do we distinguish self-touches (e.g., feeling our hand caressing our leg) from touches from external causes (e.g., feeling the touch of an insect on our leg) to generate the appropriate behavior? While this classification might seem trivial, it poses a demanding task for the brain given the massive amount of somatosensory information that needs processing at any given moment. Dominant motor control theories propose that the brain uses efferent information to predict the somatosensory consequences of our actions and attenuate the associated responses, thereby increasing the relative salience of externally generated touches. This somatosensory attenuation phenomenon is one of the reasons why we cannot tickle ourselves. 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.

Bio:

Konstantina studied Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (Greece), she did her PhD in Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Barcelona (Spain) and her postdoc at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institute (Sweden). In January 2020 she was promoted to assistant professor funded by a career development grant from the Karolinska Institutet. In May 2020 she set up her own independent group at the Department of Neuroscience as principal investigator.