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Beliefs, Bodily-Self and Consciousness

par Vuillaume, Laurène
Président du jury Destrebecqz, Arnaud
Promoteur Cleeremans, Axel
Publication Non publié, 2019-05-29

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

My thesis explores the interplay between perceptual awareness, metacognition and metarepresentations using various experimental manipulations. It is articulated around two approaches.  The first part of my thesis seeks to better understand how perceptual awareness and metacognition are modulated by experimentally-induced metarepresentations in two studies based on beliefs manipulation. We use placebo suggestions aiming at improving perceptual awareness at different levels of processing in a first set of visual experiments and we study the impact of a negative placebo suggestion impact on perceptual awareness and metacognitive abilities in a second set of tactile experiments. Ours results suggest that placebo suggestions lead to fragile if not non-existent effects in non-noxious perception and that high-level cognitive-affective components may be essential for placebo effect to occur. The second part is focused on the relationship between perceptual consciousness and a core metarepresentation that is the self. In particular, it aims at deepening our understanding of whether bodily self-consciousness has a role in shaping perceptual consciousness. This fundamental relation has indeed surprisingly remained overlooked so far, perceptual- and bodily self- consciousness being largely studied independently. This second part is composed of 3 studies. The first one examines how body movement can influence vision and metacognition through sensory attenuation. The second study investigates how manipulating one’s sense of self through sensorimotor conflicts alters perception and metacognition. The third study explores whether self-metacognition requires embodiment and to which extent one can evaluate the (un)certainty of others. Taken together, our findings suggest that the brain — and consciousness — cannot be studied in isolation, and that it is essential to take into account our body and our actions into the world, as well as the fact that we live in a social environment in order to have a deeper understanding of perceptual consciousness.