Konstantina Kilteni

Konstantina Kilteni

Assistant Professor
Visiting address: ,
Postal address: C4 Neurovetenskap, C4 Forskning Kilteni, 171 77 Stockholm

About me

  • I am an Assistant Professor (biträdande lektor) at the Neuroscience Department of KI. I run the Somatosensation and Gargalesis lab (kiltenilab.org) and I am interested in touch and tickle sensations.

Research

  • Anything related to touch fascinates me! 

    Our research focuses on understanding how we perceive touch (somatosensation) and tickle (gargalesis). In particular, we want to know why we perceive touch that is produced by our own movements different from the touch of other people, and how the brain best supports this distinction. We are also interested in understanding what makes touch ticklish and why our brain does not allow to tickle ourselves. To answer our questions, we perform behavioral and neuroimaging experiments with healthy participants.

Teaching

  • I am co-organizing and teaching in the course "Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroanatomy" at KI.

    I am also teaching "The publishing process" and "Introduction to brain imaging techniques" at KI.

     

Articles

All other publications

Grants

  • Self vs others: perceptual and neural mechanisms of self-touch
    Swedish Research Council
    1 May 2025 - 30 April 2028
    Our brain is constantly bombarded with touches that we generate ourselves, from scratching our heads to rubbing our eyes. Yet, our brain effortlessly distinguishes such self-touches from similar touches applied to our body by other people or objects. Computational theories of motor control suggest that the brain predicts the self-touches on the basis of our movements, and uses these predictions to attenuate the self-generated somatosensory input. However, the details of this process remain poorly understood, due to i) little to no insight into the temporal profile of predictions, and ii) studies often conflating feedback and prediction in one and the same event. Building on recent behavioral and neuroimaging findings from our lab, this project will use cutting-edge magnetoencephalography to delineate somatosensory processing during movement, rather than after receiving the self-touch (WP1), and experimentally omit the somatosensory feedback to isolate the contributions of predictive signals (WP2). Finally, we will combine state-of-the-art structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging data with perceptual psychophysics in a large sample to pinpoint the brain areas that implement these self-touch predictions (WP3). Taken together, this project will answer fundamental questions about self-touch, with important clinical relevance for disorders in which the distinction of self-touch from external touch is disturbed, such as schizophrenia.
  • Encoding of tactile expectations during voluntary movement
    1 January 2025 - 31 December 2026
  • The Puzzle of Self-Tickling: From Darwin’s observations to modern neuroscience insights
    BIAL Foundation
    1 January 2025 - 31 December 2026
  • The ticklish brain
    Dutch Research Council
    1 November 2024 - 31 October 2025
    Tickle is one of the most enigmatic human sensations. We do not know how a touch can transform into a tickle, and why our brains respond differently to tickling from others, and compared to when we try to tickle ourselves. We will integrate electroencephalography and state-of-the-art haptic devices to address: (a) How does the brain respond to ticklish stimuli? (b) Does brain activity preceding the ticklish stimulus predict whether we perceive it as ticklish? This research will shed light on the neuroscience of tickling, and holds clinical implications for disorders characterised by aberrant responses to tickling, such as schizophrenia.
  • The neuroscience of human tickle perception
    European Research Council
    1 January 2023 - 31 December 2027
    Tickle is one of the most enigmatic human sensations: we do not know how a touch can turn into tickle, and why our brain responds to other people’s tickles but not to our own. To date, there is no theory that can satisfactorily explain why touch on certain body areas feels more ticklish than on others, and why some people are more prone to be tickled compared to others. Despite this fundamental knowledge gap, experiments on tickle perception have been extremely scarce, and there is currently no active research on the topic at an international level.In TICKLISHUMAN, I propose a new interdisciplinary approach to understand the neuroscience of human tickle perception, based on modern haptic technology, somatosensory psychophysics, multivariate pattern analyses of neuroimaging data, brain stimulation, and advanced statistical modelling techniques. First, my team and I will establish a stimulation protocol that optimally induces tickle sensations, and we will identify their neural profile. Building upon my findings on how the brain differentiates between self-generated and externally generated touch, we will delineate the body maps where the perception of tickle is amplified and we will determine the brain mechanism that cancels self-generated tickle sensations. Finally, we will model individual differences in tickle perception as a function of central, peripheral, personality, and demographic characteristics. TICKLISHUMAN has the strong potential to radically transform our scientific and popular thinking about the social, motor, and clinical neuroscience of tickle. The novel insights from the project will permit to explore the very undervalued clinical and functional implications of tickle in the next decades, including its use as a cognitive biomarker in schizophrenia and autism, and its evolutionary function across species.
  • Group Leader Grant in Medicine
    Åke Wiberg Foundation
    1 January 2023 - 30 November 2024
  • Tactile predictions
    KI Research Grant
    1 January 2023 - 31 December 2024
  • Group Leader Grant in Medicine
    Åke Wiberg Foundation
    1 January 2020 - 31 December 2021
  • Startup Grant in Neuroscience
    Strategic Research Program in Neuroscience
    1 January 2020 - 31 December 2021
  • KI Research Grant
    KI Research Grant
    1 January 2018 - 31 December 2019
  • Marie Sklodowska Curie postdoctoral fellowship
    European Commission
    1 January 2017 - 31 December 2018
  • Wenner-Gren Postdoctoral fellowship
    Wenner-Gren Foundation
    1 January 2016 - 31 December 2016
  • KI Research Grant
    KI Research Grant
    1 January 2016 - 31 December 2017

Employments

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 2020-

Degrees and Education

  • PhD, Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, 2014
  • Bachelor and Master degree, Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 2008

Leadership and responsibility assignments

  • Course coordinator, Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroanatomy, Karolinska Institutet, 2022-
  • Research team leader, Research team leader - Kilteni group, Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, 2020-

Distinction and awards

  • Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the Week, European Commission, 2023
  • Outstanding female academic by Swiss National Science Foundation, Swiss National Science Foundation, 2023
  • Unity of Women and Science, Spanish Ministry of Science, 2023
  • ERC Starting Grant Research Highlights, European Research Council, 2022
  • Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions ambassador, European Commission, 2018

Supervision

  • Supervision to doctoral degree

    • N Cemeljic, 2023-
    • Z Xiong, 2023-
    • Leonie Seidel, 2022-
  • Supervision of postdoctoral researcher

    • T Stephani, 2024-
    • A Hoffmann, 2024-
    • X Job, 2020-

Visiting research fellowships

  • Postdoc Cognitive Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet

Thesis evaluation

  • Pizzola Emanuella, Opponent, University of Verona, 2025
  • S Abagnale, Opponent, Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, 2024
  • M Azaroual, Opponent, Inserm, 2024
  • J Rudolph, Examination board member, Radboud University Nijmegen, 2024
  • N Paraskevoudi, Opponent, University of Barcelona, 2022

Other expert reviewer/evaluation assignment

  • Evaluator of major research grant applications in local competition, Dutch Research Council, 2024
  • Evaluator of major research grant applications in local competition, KID PhD grant evaluator, Karolinska Institutet, 2023
  • Evaluator of research applications in national competition, Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale, 2023
  • Evaluator of research applications in national competition, Südtirol Research Foundation, 2021
  • Evaluator of research applications in international competition, EU Expert Project Reviewer, European Council, 2020
  • Evaluator of research applications in national competition, Israel Science Foundation, 2020
  • Evaluator of research applications in international competition, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Evaluator, European Commission, 2019
  • Evaluator of research applications in national competition, Swiss National Science Foundation, 2019

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