The Dimitris N. Chorafas Prize is awarded to Arvid Guterstam

Arvid Guterstam, postdoc at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet, has been awarded the Dimitris N. Chorafas Prize 2017 for his thesis on the neural mechanisms of the sense of bodily self.

Arvid Guterstam receives the prize for his research on the neural and cognitive basis of bodily self-perception using a combination of human behavioural and neuroimaging approaches, including the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

A key finding was that the sense of one’s own body is dependent on the integration of temporally and spatially congruent visual, tactile and proprioceptive signals in a spatial reference frame centred on the body. One piece of evidence for this arose from his discovery of the “invisible hand illusion” and the behavioural characterization of the perceptual rules that govern this striking perceptual phenomenon.

Guterstam’s thesis was awarded an honorary distinction by the Thesis Examination Board; he has published 10 articles in international peer-reviewed journals. He was recently awarded the Wenner-Gren Fellowship and now plans to move the USA for a postdoc at Princeton University, where he will study the neural basis of awareness.