Valentin Schmutz
Papers
2
Total Citations
130
H-Index
2
About
Valentin Schmutz is a leading researcher in the cognitive neuroscience of bodily self-consciousness, with a particular focus on the multisensory mechanisms that construct our subjective first-person perspective. His work investigates how visual, tactile, and vestibular signals integrate to generate the fundamental experience of being a unified self located in a body. In his highly cited 2013 study (101 citations), Schmutz demonstrated how conflicts between visuo-tactile and visuo-vestibular cues regarding the direction of gravity profoundly alter three core aspects of selfhood: self-identification, self-location, and the perceived direction of the first-person perspective. He further advanced this line of inquiry in 2014 (29 citations) by showing that manipulating visuospatial viewpoints during full-body illusions can systematically modulate where we feel our "self" is located. By combining robotic stimulation with immersive virtual reality, Schmutz has provided groundbreaking empirical evidence that our sense of self is not a fixed, unitary phenomenon but a dynamic construct built from the brain's integration of multiple sensory streams. His research has profound implications for understanding altered states of consciousness, psychiatric conditions involving depersonalization, and the development of immersive virtual reality technologies.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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