Descrizione del progetto
Approfondimento sulla consapevolezza di sé negli esseri umani
Perché dormiamo? I bambini sono consapevoli di sé stessi? Si tratta di domande sulla coscienza che non trovano risposta e che sono oggetto del progetto METAWARE, finanziato dal Consiglio europeo della ricerca. I ricercatori sono interessati a studiare i meccanismi della consapevolezza e della coscienza di sé durante il sonno negli adulti e nei neonati. Esploreranno i determinanti neurali dei processi cognitivi consci e inconsci e combineranno le informazioni con i modelli comportamentali generati durante la psicologia sperimentale e i metodi di imaging cerebrale come la fMRI e l’EEG. Il progetto possiede un’importante dimensione medica, in quanto fornirà conoscenze fondamentali sulla coscienza dei neonati nel contesto dell’anestesia e della gestione del dolore.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
- 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
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantIstituzione ospitante
75230 Paris
Francia