LUCS seminar: March 13th at 10.15. Pierre Klintefors. "Decoding Body Perception: Unravelling the Dynamics of Body Image and Body Schema"

Body perception, the self’s bodily experience, is a complex subject that intersects various disciplines, including philosophy, phenomenology, neuroscience, neuropathology, and cybernetics. This presentation will introduce the prevalent dichotomy in body perception: body image and body schema. Although these processes are intertwined, their distinction proves useful when examining neuropathological conditions such as asomatognosia (a loss of awareness of a body part) and motor control impairment. 

Furthermore, this talk will explore how the high-level dynamics of body perception, particularly ownership and motor control aspects, can be modelled as an inference problem using Active Inference, a method based on the free energy principle. The application of Active Inference presents a potential resolution to the ‘degrees of freedom’ problem, which underscores the vast range of possible joint and limb configurations that enable an agent to reach a specific point in space.