Frontiers in Psychology
September 23, 2014
Dominique P. Lippelt, Bernhard Hommel, Lorenza S. Colzato
280 citations
Different types of meditation—focused attention, open monitoring, and loving-kindness or compassion—produce distinct effects on cognitive processes such as attentional selection, conflict monitoring, divergent thinking, and convergent thinking. These meditations are associated with different neural structures and patterns of brain activity, though exactly how they operate on these processes remains unclear. This review discusses recent findings and suggests how each meditation type may affect cognition, offering directions for future research.
Psychopharmacology
October 24, 2018
Luisa Prochazkova, Dominique P. Lippelt, Lorenza S. Colzato et al.
181 citations
Microdosing psychedelics may enhance cognitive performance by improving the balance between cognitive persistence and flexibility, according to preliminary quantitative findings. The authors speculate that psychedelics affect cognitive metacontrol policies, optimizing this balance. However, they emphasize that future research with rigorous placebo-controlled designs is needed to confirm these initial results. The study provides support for cognitive-enhancing properties but remains preliminary.
Experimental psychology
November 1, 2018
Bernhard Hommel
44 citations
The self-concept emerges from active exploration of one's physical and social environment during infancy and childhood, as well as through cultural learning, and its main purpose is social communication rather than online action control. Self- and other-representations can overlap to the degree that they share features, especially when those features are particularly relevant or salient and the individual is under a particular metacontrol state. This theoretical framework, inspired by the Theory of Event Coding, explains how people represent themselves and others, how these representations interact, and what consequences this has.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2021
Bernhard Hommel
7 citations
People represent themselves using the same basic cognitive mechanisms they use to represent other individuals, events, and objects. This self-representation works by binding sensory codes that result from one's own actions into a 'Me-File'—an integrated event file. This view aligns with a Humean bundle-self theory, where the self is not a unified entity but a collection of perceptions. Recent extensions of the Theory of Event Coding provide the necessary mechanistic ingredients for this account. The Me-File concept offers a foundation for more targeted experimentation and for building artificial agents with human-like selves.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)
August 1, 2023
Ke Ma, Liping Yang, Bernhard Hommel
4 citations
Synchronous stroking or movement of a virtual body seen in front of a person can create an out-of-body experience, making the virtual body feel like their own. The effect of synchrony on explicit feelings of embodiment was stronger when the virtual body moved in sync with the person's own movements (visuomotor) than when it was stroked in sync (visuotactile). How far people drifted when walking after the experience depended on their interoceptive accuracy (IA), measured by a heartbeat counting task. For visuotactile conditions, the synchrony effect was larger in people with low IA, suggesting they relied more on visual information. For visuomotor conditions, the synchrony effect was larger in people with high IA, suggesting they relied more on feedback from their own movements.
June 14, 2021
Luisa Prochazkova, Michiel van Elk, Josephine Marschall et al.
4 citations
preprint
Microdosing psychedelic truffles increased the quality of divergent thinking, measured as the ratio of original responses to total responses on the Alternative Uses Task, in a pooled analysis of three double-blind placebo-controlled trials with 175 participants. The unadjusted originality score was significantly higher only when relative dosage (dose per body weight) was considered. No effects were found on convergent thinking or other divergent-thinking scores. The effects were subtle and persisted after controlling for expectation and demographic biases. The findings underscore the importance of controlling for placebo effects and prior psychedelic experience in microdosing research.
Neuropharmacology
October 17, 2025
Luisa Prochazkova, Josephine Marschall, Dominique P. Lippelt et al.
3 citations
Microdosing psilocybin truffles does not reliably enhance cognitive or emotional functioning beyond a placebo. In two randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials conducted in semi-naturalistic settings, microdosing did not significantly affect behavioral or subjective measures compared to placebo. Some initial effects on social cognition, mood, and self-reported cognitive flexibility were observed but did not remain significant after correcting for multiple comparisons. Participants predominantly reported positive subjective experiences regardless of condition, though negative bodily feelings were enhanced in the active condition. Participants remained effectively blinded throughout the trials.
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
October 1, 2024
Yingbing Sun, Ruiyu Zhu, Bernhard Hommel et al.
3 citations
Social exclusion reduces people's sense of agency and ownership over a virtual hand. In a virtual hand illusion experiment, participants who were excluded during a Cyberball game reported weaker feelings of ownership and agency and showed reduced physiological and behavioral measures of these experiences compared to included participants. Synchrony between the virtual hand and the participant's own hand strengthened both ownership and agency across all measures, but this effect was weaker for excluded individuals. The findings indicate that social context shapes fundamental aspects of self-perception.
Neuropharmacology
November 2, 2025
Luisa Prochazkova, Josephine Marschall, Michiel van Elk et al.
2 citations
Microdosing psilocybin from truffles modestly improved the quality of divergent thinking—specifically the ratio of original responses to total responses—in a pooled analysis of three double-blind, placebo-controlled trials with 171 participants. The effect on unadjusted originality was significant only when dosage relative to body weight was considered, and it remained after controlling for dose guess and demographic biases. No effects were found on other measures of divergent thinking or on convergent thinking. The findings underscore the need to account for placebo effects and prior psychedelic experience when evaluating microdosing claims.
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
October 2, 2025
Weitao Zhang, Zsuzsika Sjoerds, Rebecca Mourits et al.
The brain's metacontrol states of persistence and flexibility are linked to distinct neural networks. Persistence-related conditions activated areas modulated by frontal and striatal dopamine—prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and basal ganglia—indicating goal-directed attention and top-down control. Flexibility-related conditions activated default mode network regions, suggesting reduced top-down control. This pattern was clearer for creativity tasks than for meditation. No significant effects emerged when contrasting focused-attention and open-monitoring meditation, nor when examining brain activation overlap between meditation and creativity at the whole-brain level. The metacontrol model of creativity received partial support, but its prediction for the left inferior frontal gyrus showed the opposite result, requiring clarification.
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
October 1, 2017
Bernhard Hommel, Lorenza S. Colzato
People often face trade-offs between sticking with a strategy (persistence) and switching to a new one (flexibility), a dilemma requiring metacontrol—the regulation of which cognitive-control policy to use. Individual differences in metacontrol biases toward persistence or flexibility show up in specially designed tasks and correlate with genetic variations in dopamine systems and with whether a person comes from an individualistic or collectivistic culture. Yet mood and meditation also shift these biases: negative mood and focused-attention meditation favor persistence, while positive mood and open-monitoring meditation favor flexibility. Thus genetic and cultural factors do not fully determine metacontrol; a proposed framework explains how they set defaults that situational factors can override.