Activités de recherche

My research interests include various aspects of spatial and bodily awareness, and how clinical conditions can perturb it. My main achievement is the study of bodily self-consciousness disorders, including the feeling that body parts do not belong anymore to patients (e.g., disownership, somatoparaphrenia). Disownership has been always considered a rare condition, partly due to the limited diagnostic tools. However, by developing a new assessment, we were able to identify latent/covert forms of this syndrome otherwise undetectable under standard examination. For this reason, I am currently aiming at unveiling mechanisms underlying disownership. A second achievement is the analysis of the processes responsible for building and maintaining a coherent self-consciousness. I have examined some aspects of multi-sensory exteroceptive-interoceptive integration, on healthy participants and neurological patients, to show that cardiac signals modulate awareness of visual stimuli. The third achievement is the in-depth study of unilateral spatial neglect (USN), a disabling neuropsychological syndrome of defective attention and representation of one hemi-space. In a series of studies we have analysed the presence of productive symptoms in USN, as well as the effects of rehabilitation methods to treat it. I am currently leading a project about USN rehabilitation in the acute phase of a brain damage.

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