Becoming aware of the world and ourselves: Novel approaches to distinguish between perceptual processing and access consciousness in face and body ownership perception

NB - Renzo’s talk will not be uploaded here or on Youtube until July 1st, 2025. Apologies for the inconvenience

The human brain is finely attuned to both visual and body-related information, enabling us to accurately distinguish whether sensory inputs originate from the external environment or from within our own bodies—and to generate subjective experiences based on them. However, understanding how the brain transforms sensory input into complex perceptions and subjective experiences remains one of the most profound and unresolved questions in philosophy of mind, psychology, and the cognitive and brain sciences. In this talk, I will examine foundational methods in visual perception and body ownership research, highlighting their common limitations in addressing core questions in consciousness science, and presenting recent advancements designed to overcome these challenges. First, I will focus on complex visual perception, reviewing how experimental paradigms such as masking and interocular suppression have been used to investigate the mechanisms underlying visual awareness. I will then introduce our new approach—the minimal exposures paradigm—which employs unmasked visual presentations with 0.002-millisecond precision. This method allows us to determine the minimal exposure durations required for the visual system to extract meaningful information from complex stimuli. I will also present several ongoing projects that apply this paradigm to explore the dynamics of visual processing and awareness. Second, I will turn to body ownership perception, discussing how it has traditionally been studied using bodily illusions and examining the limitations of these approaches. I will introduce our new robotic psychophysical methods, which enable precise quantification of multisensory perception and the awareness of body ownership, and explore their potential to advance the field. Finally, I will discuss the strengths and limitations of these new paradigms and outline some of the promising directions we are currently pursuing with these techniques.