Baptiste Gauthier | EPFL Graph Search

I graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan in biochemistry and bio-ingeneering departement as a "Normalien" Student.I received then a first-year Master of cellular signalling and neuroscience in University of Paris-Saclay and a 2nd-year Master of cognitive science in Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (Cogmaster). After a PhD in cognitive neuroscience on the relationship between oscillatory fluctuations of brain signals and time perception directed by the Pr Andreas Kleinschmidt, MD, PhD, I investigated the neural correlates of Mental Time Travel, the human ability to mentally go back in the past and plan the future, in the Brain Dynamics Team, Headed by Virginie van Wassenhove, PhD, in the Neurospin Center hosted by the CEA.I am currently post-doctoral researcher and investigating autobiographical memory in the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience (LNCO), at Campus Biotech in Geneva, headed by the Pr Olaf Blanke, MD, PhD.

Sense of self impacts spatial navigation and hexadirectional coding in human entorhinal cortex

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Baptiste Gauthier, Hyukjun Moon, Hyeongdong Park

Grid cells in entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual’s location in space and rely on environmental cues and self-motion cues derived from the individual’s body. Body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self and based on integrated sensorimotor signals (proprioceptive, tactile, visual, motor) that have been shown to enhance self-centered processing. However, it is currently unknown whether such sensorimotor signals that modulate self-centered processing impact grid cells and spatial navigation. Integrating the online manipulation of bodily signals, to modulate self-centered processing, with a spatial navigation task and an fMRI measure to detect grid cell-like representation (GCLR) in humans, we report improved performance in spatial navigation and decreased GCLR in EC. This decrease in entorhinal GCLR was associated with an increase in retrosplenial cortex activity, which was correlated with participants’ navigation performance. These data link self-centered processes during spatial navigation to entorhinal and retrosplenial activity and highlight the role of different bodily factors at play when navigating in VR.

2022

First-person body view modulates the neural substrates of episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: A functional connectivity study

Olaf Blanke, Thomas William Arthur Bolton, Lucie Bréchet, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Baptiste Gauthier, Bruno Herbelin, Florian Lance, Robin Mange, Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville

Episodic memory (EM) is classically conceived as a memory for events, localized in space and time, and characterized by autonoetic consciousness (ANC) allowing to mentally travel back in time and subjectively relive an event. Building on recent evidence that the first-person visual co-perception of one's own body during encoding impacts EM, we used a scene recognition task in immersive virtual reality (VR) and measured how first-person body view would modulate peri-encoding resting-state fMRI, EM performance, and ANC. Specifically, we investigated the impact of body view on post-encoding functional connectivity in an a priori network of regions related either to EM or multisensory bodily processing and used these regions in a seed-to-whole brain analysis. Post-encoding connectivity between right hippocampus (rHC) and right parahippocampus (rPHC) was enhanced when participants encoded scenes while seeing their body. Moreover, the strength of connectivity between the rHC, rPHC and the neocortex displayed two main patterns with respect to body view. The connectivity with a sensorimotor fronto-parietal network, comprising primary somatosensory and primary motor cortices, correlated with ANC after - but not before - encoding, depending on body view. The opposite change of connectivity was found between rHC, rPHC and the medial parietal cortex (from being correlated with ANC before encoding to an absence of correlation after encoding), but irrespective of body view. Linking immersive VR and fMRI for the study of EM and ANC, these findings suggest that seeing one's own body during encoding impacts the brain activity related to EM formation by modulating the connectivity between the right hippocampal formation and the neocortical regions involved in the processing of multisensory bodily signals and self-consciousness.

2020

First-person body view modulates the neural substrates of episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: A functional connectivity study

Olaf Blanke, Thomas William Arthur Bolton, Lucie Bréchet, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Baptiste Gauthier, Bruno Herbelin, Florian Lance, Robin Mange, Dimitri Nestor Alice Van De Ville

2020