Renzo Lanfranco

I am a Principal Researcher in cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology at Karolinska Institutet, based in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and the Department of Neuroscience. My research investigates how conscious awareness shapes perception, social cognition, and bodily self-perception.

I combine psychophysics, behavioural experiments, computational modelling, psychophysiology, electroencephalography, neuroimaging, and machine-learning approaches to understand how sensory information becomes consciously accessible, how it guides behaviour, and how these mechanisms are altered in neuropsychiatric conditions.

My research focuses on the role of consciousness in human cognition. The brain continuously receives information from the external world and from within the body, yet only some of this information reaches conscious awareness. A central aim of my work is to understand what conscious access is needed for, and which perceptual and neural mechanisms allow sensory signals to become consciously experienced.

I study this question in two main domains. The first is visual and social perception, particularly face processing. Faces provide crucial information for social interaction, including identity, emotional expression, gender, and gaze direction. My work examines how these different facial attributes are detected, discriminated, and consciously perceived, especially under conditions in which visual information is minimal, ambiguous, or outside awareness.

The second domain is bodily self-perception, especially the sense of body ownership: the feeling that a body or body part belongs to oneself. I investigate how the brain integrates visual, tactile, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals to generate this experience, and how conscious awareness, perceptual sensitivity, decision bias, metacognition, and evidence accumulation contribute to bodily self-consciousness.

A further line of work examines the neurocognitive mechanisms of hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion, with a focus on how suggestion can alter perception, metacognition, and conscious experience.

Across these research areas, my broader goal is to use methods from consciousness science, psychophysics, and computational neuroscience to improve our understanding of clinical conditions involving altered social perception, body representation, and self-awareness, including autism, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and related neuropsychiatric conditions.

I teach the “Association Cortex and Higher Cognitive Functions” module as part of the Neuroscience course in the MSc Biomedicine programme at Karolinska Institutet.