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About

Giulio Rognini’s research sits at the electrifying intersection of cognitive neuroscience, robotics, and psychiatry, where he uses cutting-edge technology to probe the very foundations of self-consciousness. His major contributions center on understanding how the brain constructs our sense of body ownership and self, particularly through the manipulation of sensorimotor signals. Rognini is renowned for his pioneering work on experimentally inducing “presence hallucinations”—the feeling of an invisible entity nearby—using robotic interfaces. His landmark 2014 paper, “Neurological and Robot-Controlled Induction of an Apparition” (148 citations), demonstrated that conflicting sensorimotor feedback can reliably generate this eerie sensation, a breakthrough with profound implications for understanding psychosis. He has extended this paradigm to clinical populations, showing in a 2021 study (51 citations) that robot-induced hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease depend on altered processing in fronto-temporal networks. Rognini also explores how tool use, from surgical robots to virtual interfaces, reshapes body representation and multisensory integration, as seen in his highly cited work on voluntary self-touch (80 citations) and robotic surgical tools (61 citations). His “Cognetics” framework (2015, 38 citations) proposes robotic interfaces as direct windows into conscious experience, making his work essential reading for anyone fascinated by how technology can reveal the mind’s hidden machinery.