Projektbeschreibung
Das Selbstbewusstsein des Menschen erforschen
Weshalb schlafen wir? Sind Kleinkinder selbstbewusst? Dies sind unbeantwortete Fragen über das Bewusstsein und das Thema des Projekts METAWARE, das vom Europäischen Forschungsrat finanziert wird. Die Forschenden sind daran interessiert, die Mechanismen des Bewusstseins und des Selbstbewusstseins während des Schlafs bei Erwachsenen und Säuglingen zu untersuchen. Sie werden die neuronalen Faktoren bewusster und unbewusster kognitiver Prozesse erforschen und die Informationen mit Verhaltensmustern aus der experimentellen Psychologie und bildgebenden Verfahren des Gehirns wie funktioneller Magnetresonanztomografie und Elektroenzephalografie kombinieren. Das Projekt weist eine wichtige medizinische Dimension auf, da es grundlegende Erkenntnisse über das Bewusstsein von Säuglingen im Zusammenhang mit Anästhesie und Schmerztherapie bereitstellen wird.
Ziel
Proposal summary.
Understanding the psychological and neurobiological determinants of consciousness is fundamental. Yet, the main trend focusing on how the front of the brain (prefrontal cortex) interacts with the back (sensory cortex) for accessing perceptual contents limits our understanding of the information coding schemas underlying consciousness. Here, we explore these informational properties in adults and infants from 3 novel perspectives: sleep, self-consciousness and metacognition. First, we will study unconscious processes in the full absence of consciousness, including self-consciousness and metacognition, by focusing on the sleeping brain’s ability to process and learn information from its environment. While most studies on subliminal perception measured unconscious processes intermixed with conscious ones, studying their impact in the sleeping brain will provide new insights on a broader and more natural type of unconscious. Secondly, we will explore the fundamental issue of whether multiple agents can share information and each other’s conscious access mechanisms, without being aware of it. Using a novel approach called the “Reversed Perspective Paradigm”, we will study if access to conscious content can be determined by another agent’s actions and sensory processing while the agent is lured to believe she owns these access mechanisms. We aim at challenging the long-held conviction that consciousness is a paradigm of privacy, by breaking it using virtual reality and objective methods from psychology. Finally, we will attempt to answer the two fundamental issues of whether infants have a capacity for metacognition (do they know they know) and whether they experience self-consciousness (do they feel themselves as a unitary entity). Examining these self-reflection mechanisms, through behavioural and EEG techniques, will address the issue of whether humans in the initial state have a primitive self, or are actually unconscious about their own person.
Wissenschaftliches Gebiet
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologymammalogyprimatology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiology
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligencemachine learningdeep learning
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationsvirtual reality
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencessoftwaresoftware applicationssimulation software
Programm/Programme
Thema/Themen
Finanzierungsplan
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantGastgebende Einrichtung
75230 Paris
Frankreich