Axel Cleeremans
Papers
7
Total Citations
311
H-Index
5
About
Axel Cleeremans is a leading cognitive scientist whose research lies at the intersection of consciousness, agency, and embodied cognition. His work fundamentally explores how humans experience control over their actions and how this sense of agency (SoA) emerges from the dynamic interplay between mind, body, and environment. Cleeremans has made major contributions by proposing that SoA is not merely a post-hoc inference from action-outcome associations, but involves a real-time "tracking control" process that monitors each step along the behavioral chain. This insight, detailed in his highly cited work (37 citations), reshapes our understanding of selfhood and volition. His influential 2015 paper on human agency and embodiment (175 citations) and his explorations of the rubber hand illusion with robotic limbs (67 citations) have deepened our grasp of how embodiment shapes self-awareness. More recently, Cleeremans has ventured into cutting-edge territory, investigating how brain-machine interfaces alter the sense of agency (23 citations) and pioneering research on human-swarm intelligence and collective decision-making in multi-agent systems. His work bridges cognitive science, robotics, and social cognition, offering profound insights into what it means to be an agent in an increasingly hybrid world.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1The relationship between human agency and embodiment175 citations · 2015
- 2
- 3The Sense of Agency as Tracking Control37 citations · 2016
- 4How using brain-machine interfaces influences the human sense of agency23 citations · 2021
- 5Learning from humans to build social cognition among robots6 citations · 2023
- 6
- 7Collective decision making by embodied neural agents1 citations · 2025