Anne gave an oral presentation on "Why do we laugh when we get tickled? Emotionally ambivalent responses to ticklish touch on the foot soles" in ESCAN 2026.
Ziliang gives an oral presentation on "What makes a touch feel ticklish?" in ESCAN 2026.
Congrats, Noa, on this achievement! StratNeuro Retreat brings together neuroscience researchers from Karolinska Institutet, Umeå University, and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) to discuss the latest neuroscience research. You can read more about it here: https://ki.se/en/research/research-areas-centres-and-networks/strategic-research-areas/the-strategic-research-area-neuroscience-stratneuro/annual-stratneuro-retreat
Tilman gave an oral presentation on "Neural dynamics of human ticklishness" at Donder’s Day 2026: https://www.ru.nl/en/donders-institute/agenda/donders-day-2026
Konstantina gives a keynote lecture in the first meeting of the Swedish Society for Neuroscience in Gothenburg: https://ssfn.se/events
Read our article The surprising science of tickling : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-built-a-tickle-robot-to-solve-one-of-biologys-strangest-mysteries/
In his latest paper, Noa Cemeljic argues that Vision Fine-Tunes Predictions of Bimanual Self-Touch: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ejn.70435 Congratulations Noa!
Dr. Anne Hoffmann received the Trainee Professional Development Award! TPDA recognizes undergraduate and graduate students and post baccalaureate and postdoctoral scholars who demonstrate scientific merit and excellence in research. Congratulations Anne!!
Our symposium “Cancelation of predicted action consequences across species and levels of predictions” has been accepted for SfN 2025. Speakers include Cornelius Schwarz, Kathleen Cullen, David Schneider and Konstantina Kilteni!
See you at San Diego!
Adela is not only an excellent researcher, but also a great artist. Her artwork was selected to be displayed at the KI Culture Day.
Congratulations, Adela! https://news.ki.se/calendar/ki-culture-day-2025
Noa presents our research at BRNet seminar series! (Friday, 17th of October, 11:00 CET) Noa will give a talk about our work, with a special focus on his PhD projects! For more information and registration, visit: https://bodyrepresentation.wixsite.com/brnet/general-5-1
The research of our lab will be presented in a symposium at the ICON 2025 - International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, 15-20th of September 2025, Oporto - Portugal. Stay in touch for updates! The symposium is called Exploring Self-generation Effects Across Sensory Modalities: Neural Mechanisms And Clinical Implications and organized by Dr Iria SanMiguel.
In a new preprint, Job et al. report that motor prediction reduces beta-band power and enhances cerebellar-somatosensory connectivity before self-touch to enable its attenuation!
Check the work here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.29.667127v1
Congratulations Ziliang, we are very proud of you!!
Anne is giving a talk on “Sensory attenuation of self-touch and -tickle: Evidence from psychophysics and neuroimaging” in the next IASAT conference. Her talk is part of the symposium Affective touch and sensorimotor processing organized by Dr. India Morisson. Other speakers in the symposium include Dr. Valentina Cazzato, De. Andrew Marshall, and Dr. India Morrison (the symposium organizer).
Where: Normannenhaus, Jena, Germany from Monday, 9th June, 2025
For more info: https://iasat2025.uni-jena.de/
Congrats to Noa for getting this highly competitive grant from Karolinska Institutet! The grant will be used to fund his participation at ICON 2025 - International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, where he will present a poster titled “Sensorimotor Predictions Dynamically Modulate Somatosensory Perception During Movements to Self-touch”
Konstantina summarised the existing literature on tickling in her paper “The extraordinary enigma of ordinary tickle behavior: Why gargalesis still puzzles neuroscience”.
Find the paper here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt0350
Wendy will be presenting a poster on her exciting research into the psychophysiology of human tickle sensations at NeuroFrance 2025. Catch her session on Friday, May 16th — don’t forget to stop by!
Konstantina presents the lab’s work in drawings at the Neuromorphic Computing workshop at Capocaccia 2025. For more information: https://capocaccia.cc/en/event/ccnw25/program/
Congratulations to Ziliang Xiong for his paper “Costs and benefits of temporal expectations on somatosensory perception and decision-making”, now published in Cognition.
Find the paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027725000861?via%3Dihub
Noa will be presenting our research to high school students as a part of Brain Awareness Week, the popular science manifestation aiming to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research.
Location: Tekniska museet, The Cell, Hagaplan 4, Stockholm
If you are at the Berlin Mind Brain Body Meeting, don't forget to stop by the poster of Ziliang Xiong to check on his latest research on human ticklishness #MBB25!
If you are at the Berlin Mind Brain Body Meeting, don't forget to stop by the poster of Dr. Tilman Stephani to check on his MEG project (and his MSCA) #MBB25!
Why can’t you tickle ourselves? Konstantina was interviewed by LiveScience. Check the new piece in Live Science by Roberta McLain on why we cannot tickle ourselves!
https://www.livescience.com/health/why-cant-you-tickle-yourself
Konstantina was invited by Assoc. Professor Patrick Forbes to give a talk about the lab’s research at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
New paper out by Noa Cemeljic! Across 2 experiments, Noa observed a gradual attenuation in somatosensory perception as participants reached for their left hand with their right hand, in line w Bays & Wolpert(2005)! Stay in tune! More to come from brilliant Noa!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004224028700#sec3
Congratulations to Tilman for getting the Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellowship NeuroSelfTickle!! We are so proud of you!
Tilman is going to investigate self-tickle cancelation in humans using laminar MEG. Stay tuned with his exciting research!
We are on fire here at the Touch and Tickle Lab! We got a Research Project grant from the BIAL Foundation called The Puzzle of Self-Tickling: From Darwin’s observations to modern neuroscience insights.
Our lab at Karolinska is looking for a postdoctoral researcher and a research assistant! The positions are about to open soon. For more info, see Positions !
Konstantina was invited by Assoc. Prof. Matej Hoffmann to give a talk about the lab’s research.
We are also launching a new collaboration with the Technical University of Prague and the University Hospital of Prague. Stay in tune!