Consciousness remains a formidable challenge. Different theories of consciousness have proposed different mechanisms to account for phenomenal experience. Here, appealing to Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, Social Theories, and Predictive Processing, we introduce a novel framework -the Self-Organizing Metarerpresentational Account (SOMA), in which consciousness is viewed as something that the brain learns to do. The brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of metarepresentations that qualify target first-order representations. Experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and that have learned to care more about certain states than about others. Thus, consciousness is the brain's (unconscious, embodied, enactive, non-conceptual) theory about itself.

One of the hallmarks of human existence is that we all hold beliefs that determine how we act. Amongst such beliefs, the idea that we are endowed with free will appears to be linked to prosocial behaviors, probably by enhancing the feeling of responsibility of individuals over their own actions. However, such effects appear to be more complex that one might have initially thought. Here, we aimed at exploring how induced disbeliefs in free will impact the sense of agency over the consequences of one’s own actions in a paradigm that engages morality. To do so, we asked participants to choose to inflict or to refrain from inflicting an electric choc to another participant in exchange of a small financial benefit. Our results show that participants who were primed with a text defending neural determinism – the idea that humans are a mere bunch of neurons guided by their biology – administered fewer shocks and were less vindictive toward the other participant. Importantly, this finding only held for female participants. These results show the complex interaction between gender, (dis)beliefs in free will and moral behavior.

Bodily self-consciousness is defined as a set of prereflective representations of integrated bodily signals giving rise to self-identification, self-location and first-person perspective. While bodily selfconsciousness is known to modulate perception, little is known about its influence on higher-level cognitive processes. Here, we manipulated bodily self-consciousness by applying sensorimotor conflicts while participants performed a perceptual task followed by confidence judgments. Results showed that sensorimotor conflicts altered perceptual monitoring by decreasing metacognitive performance. In a second experiment, we replicated this finding and extended our results by showing that sensorimotor conflicts also altered action monitoring, as measured implicitly through intentional binding. In a third experiment, we showed that effects on perceptual monitoring were induced specifically by sensorimotor conflicts related to the trunk and not to the hand. Taken together, our results suggest that bodily self-consciousness may serve as a scaffold for perceptual and action monitoring.

It is well known that the human brain continuously predicts the sensory consequences of its own body movements, which typically results in sensory attenuation. Yet, the extent and exact mechanisms underlying sensory attenuation are still debated. To explore this issue, we asked participants to decide which of two visual stimuli was of higher contrast in a virtual reality situation where one of the stimuli could appear behind the participants’ invisible moving hand or not. Over two experiments, we measured the effects of such “virtual occlusion” on first-order sensitivity and on metacognitive monitoring. Our findings show that self-generated hand movements reduced the apparent contrast of the stimulus. This result can be explained by the active inference theory. Moreover, sensory attenuation seemed to affect only first-order sensitivity and not (second-order) metacognitive judgments of confidence.

It is well known that the human brain continuously predicts the sensory consequences of its own body movements, which typically results in sensory attenuation. Yet, the extent and exact mechanisms underlying sensory attenuation are still debated. To explore this issue, we asked participants to decide which of two visual stimuli was of higher contrast in a virtual reality situation where one of the stimuli could appear behind the participants' invisible moving hand or not. Over two experiments, we measured the effects of such "virtual occlusion" on first-order sensitivity and on metacognitive monitoring. Our findings show that self-generated hand movements reduced the apparent contrast of the stimulus. This result can be explained by the active inference theory. Moreover, sensory attenuation seemed to affect only first-order sensitivity and not (second-order) metacognitive judgments of confidence.