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The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
In human studies, how averaged activation in a brain region relates to human behavior has been extensively investigated. This approach has led to the finding that positive and negative facial preferences are represented by different brain…
The cortical processes involved in learning are not well understood. Recent experiments have studied population-level response in the orofacial somatosensory (S1) and motor (S1) cortices of rhesus macaque monkeys during adaptation to a…
Consider a two-player game repeated N times. Player 1 can choose between two styles (for interpretability, offensive and defensive), whereas Player 2 uses a single fixed style. Let X N\,:= \#wins -\#losses for Player 1 after N games, and…
Financial markets are influenced by human behavior that deviates from rationality due to cognitive biases. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) models for financial decision-making assume rational agents, potentially overlooking the…
Neural reasoning accuracy improves when generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, the source of this improvement is yet unclear. Here, we investigate and factorize the benefit of generating intermediate steps for symbolic reasoning.…
Planning is useful. It lets people take actions that have desirable long-term consequences. But, planning is hard. It requires thinking about consequences, which consumes limited computational and cognitive resources. Thus, people should…
Metastable brain dynamics are characterized by abrupt, jump-like modulations so that the neural activity in single trials appears to unfold as a sequence of discrete, quasi-stationary states. Evidence that cortical neural activity unfolds…
The brain did not develop a dedicated device for reasoning. This fact bears dramatic consequences. While for perceptuo-motor functions neural activity is shaped by the input's statistical properties, and processing is carried out at high…
In this Habilitation Thesis, I synthesize 10 years of work on the role of the motor system in sensorimotor decision-making. First, a large part of the work we initially performed (2014-2020) questioned the functional role of the motor…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
Inferring emotions from physiological signals has gained much traction in the last years. Physiological responses to emotions, however, are commonly interfered and overlapped by physical activities, posing a challenge towards emotion…
Most decisions require information gathering from a stimulus presented with different gaps. Indeed, the brain process of this integration is rarely ambiguous. Recently, it has been claimed that humans can optimally integrate the information…
We introduce an evolutionary game with feedback between perception and reality, which we call the reality game. It is a game of chance in which the probabilities for different objective outcomes (e.g., heads or tails in a coin toss) depend…
Several experimental studies claim to be able to predict the outcome of simple decisions from brain signals measured before subjects are aware of their decision. Often, these studies use multivariate pattern recognition methods with the…
Recent work in cognitive neuroscience has focused on analyzing the brain as a network, rather than as a collection of independent regions. Prior studies taking this approach have found that individual differences in the degree of modularity…
In this paper we explore the use of electrical biosignals measured on scalp and corresponding to mental relaxation and concentration tasks in order to control an object in a video game. To evaluate the requirements of such a system in terms…
Fighting Fantasy is a popular recreational fantasy gaming system worldwide. Combat in this system progresses through a stochastic game involving a series of rounds, each of which may be won or lost. Each round, a limited resource (`luck')…
Pain is a multidimensional process, which can be modulated by emotions, however, the mechanisms underlying this modulation are unknown. We used pictures with different emotional valence (negative, positive, neutral) as primes and applied…
Understanding, predicting, and learning from other people's actions are fundamental human social-cognitive skills. Little is known about how and when we consider other's actions and outcomes when making our own decisions. We developed a…