Fosco Bernasconi

2014-Present:

post-doc at the EPFL, Laboratory of Congitive Neuroscience.

2012-2014:

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Charité University Medicine, Berlin, Germany.

2012:

Postdoctoral Research Associate,Psychiatric University Hospital (PUK), Zurich, Switzerland.

2008-2011:

PhD in Neurosciences,Lemanic Neurosciences Doctoral School, Faculty of Biology and Medicine, Lausanne University, Switzerland.

2007-2008:

Master in Medical Biology,Faculty of Biology & Medicine, Lausanne University,Switzerland.

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Phantom Boarder Relates to Experimentally‐Induced Presence Hallucinations in Parkinson's Disease

Fosco Bernasconi, Olaf Blanke, Jevita Potheegadoo

Phantom boarder (PB) is the sensation that someone uninvited is in the patient's home despite evidence to the contrary. It is mostly reported by patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies or Parkinson's disease (PD). Presence hallucination (PH) is frequent in neurodegenerative disease, shares several aspects with PB, and is the sensation that someone is nearby, behind or next to the patient (when nobody is actually there). Recent work developed a sensorimotor method to robotically induce PH (robot-induced PH, riPH) and demonstrated that a subgroup of PD patients showed abnormal sensitivity for riPH.

2023

Neuroscience robotics for controlled induction and real-time assessment of hallucinations

Fosco Bernasconi, Olaf Blanke, Eva Blondiaux, Herberto Dhanis Pedro De Barros Camacho, Masayuki Hara, Laurent Frédéric Jenni, Jevita Potheegadoo, Giulio Rognini

Although hallucinations are important and frequent symptoms in major psychiatric and neurological diseases, little is known about their brain mechanisms. Hallucinations are unpredictable and private experiences, making their investigation, quantification and assessment highly challenging. A major shortcoming in hallucination research is the absence of methods able to induce specific and short-lasting hallucinations, which resemble clinical hallucinations, can be elicited repeatedly and vary across experimental conditions. By integrating clinical observations and recent advances in cognitive neuroscience with robotics, we have designed a novel device and sensorimotor method able to repeatedly induce a specific, clinically relevant hallucination: presence hallucination. Presence hallucinations are induced by applying specific conflicting (spatiotemporal) sensorimotor stimulation including an upper extremity and the torso of the participant. Another, MRI-compatible, robotic device using similar sensorimotor stimulation permitted the identification of the brain mechanisms of these hallucinations. Enabling the identification of behavioral and a frontotemporal neural biomarkers of hallucinations, under fully controlled experimental conditions and in real-time, this method can be applied in healthy participants as well as patients with schizophrenia, neurodegenerative disease or other hallucinations. The execution of these protocols requires intermediate-level skills in cognitive neuroscience and MRI processing, as well as minimal coding experience to control the robotic device. These protocols take ~3 h to be completed.

2022

Evidence accumulation relates to perceptual consciousness and monitoring

Fosco Bernasconi, Olaf Blanke, Wenwen Chang, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Michael Eric Anthony Pereira, Mi Xue Tan

A fundamental scientific question concerns the neural basis of perceptual consciousness and perceptual monitoring resulting from the processing of sensory events. Although recent studies identified neurons reflecting stimulus visibility, their functional role remains unknown. Here, we show that perceptual consciousness and monitoring involve evidence accumulation. We recorded single-neuron activity in a participant with a microelectrode in the posterior parietal cortex, while they detected vibrotactile stimuli around detection threshold and provided confidence estimates. We find that detected stimuli elicited neuronal responses resembling evidence accumulation during decision-making, irrespective of motor confounds or task demands. We generalize these findings in healthy volunteers using electroencephalography. Behavioral and neural responses are reproduced with a computational model considering a stimulus as detected if accumulated evidence reaches a bound, and confidence as the distance between maximal evidence and that bound. We conclude that gradual changes in neuronal dynamics during evidence accumulation relates to perceptual consciousness and perceptual monitoring in humans.

2021

Multisensory integration

Multisensory integration, also known as multimodal integration, is the study of how information from the different sensory modalities (such as sight, sound, touch, smell, self-motion, and taste) may b

Neural oscillation

Neural oscillations, or brainwaves, are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. Neural tissue can generate oscillatory activity in many ways, driven either

Electroencephalography

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. The biosignals detected by EEG have been shown to represent the postsynaptic pote