Louise Kirsch

Associate Professor, Université Paris Cité – Co-director of the Perception Action and Cognition team

How do we become aware of our body ? How do we perceive others ? And how tactile experience shapes social cognition ?

These are all different questions I am trying to tackle in my research.

I investigate how we use multisensory experiences and our body to understand ourselves and others, while always taking into account how affect shapes perception.

In particular, I explore how tactile experience shapes perception of self and others. The importance of touch is often neglected, but it is essential to development and social interactions. So just as much as action understanding is important for navigating our social world, so is touch.

To so, I combine behavioural, physiological and brain imaging methods, in typical young adults, as well in the elderly and now also in infants and young children.

List of publication here

Selected Publications

– vomidcolumnn Mohr, M.*, Kirsch, L. P.*, & Fotopoulou, A. (2021). Social touch deprivation during COVID- 19: effects on psychological wellbeing and craving interpersonal touch. Royal Society Open Science, 8(9), 210287. doi: 10.1098/rsos.210287

– Baiano, C., Job, X., Santangelo, G., Auvray, M.*, & Kirsch, L. P.* (2021). Interactions between interoception and perspective-taking: Current state of research and future directions. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.08.007

– Kirsch, L.P., Job, X.E., Auvray, M., & Hayward, V. (2020). Harnessing Tactile Waves to Measure Skin-to-Skin Interactions. Behavior Research Methods. doi: 10.3758/s13428-020-01492-3

– Kirsch, L.P., Besharati, S., Papadaki, C., Crucianelli, L., Bertagnoli, S., Ward, N., Moro, V., Jenkinson, P., & Fotopoulou, A. (2020). Damage to the right insula disrupts the perception of affective touch. eLife, 9, e47895. doi: 10.7554/eLife.47895

– Kirsch, L.P. & Cross, E.S. (2015) Additive routes to action learning: Layering experience shapes engagement of the action observation network. Cerebral Cortex. 25(12). doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhv167.