Armin Schnider
Function: Professeur ordinaire
Group name: Cognitive Neurorehabilitation Laboratory
Group type: Main
Affiliations: Faculty of Medicine, Geneva University Hospitals, Department of Clinical Neurosciences
Domains: Perception, Attention and Cognition
Keywords: amnesia, brain mapping, confabulation, neurorehabilitation
Research activities
Our research laboratory is part of the Division of Neurorehabilitation (Service de Neurorééducation) at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences of the University Hospital of Geneva. Our main research topic concerns human thought and memory disorders and functions. In particular, we are interested in the confusion of reality by brain lesioned subjects, as evident from disorientation and confabulation -the emergence of souvenirs of events that never happened. Using experimental cognitive evaluation, lesion analysis and high-resolution EEG, we discovered a mechanism that synchronizes thought and behaviour with ongoing reality. We call it « Orbitofrontal Reality Filtering » (ORFi). This function appears to depend on an extinction signal produced by the posterior orbitofrontal cortex, at 200-300 ms, whenever an evoked memory or thought finds no correlate in true reality. Ongoing studies verify its mechanism and the underlying anatomy in non-selected patient groups.
Reference: Armin Schnider. The Confabulating Mind. How the brain creates reality, 2nd edition. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Latest publications
Anatomical and functional predictors of disorientation after first-ever brain damage.
Panic Attack, Severe Hypophosphatemia and Rhabdomyolysis in the Setting of a Motor Functional Neurological Disorder.
Task relevance and negative reward modulate the disengagement deficit of patients with spatial neglect.
Deficient Novelty Detection and Encoding in Early Alzheimer's Disease: An ERP Study.
Videos
Contact
Département des neurosciences cliniques
HUG
Email: Armin.Schnider@unige.ch