Consciousness and cognition
February 1, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Oskar Dragan, Anka Slana Ozimič et al.
8 citations
Working memory is usually measured with psychological tasks that focus on the reliability of outcomes rather than how participants experience the tasks. This study replicated protocols for investigating the lived experience of working memory using a visual span task. Eighteen healthy participants aged 21 to 35 provided subjective reports. Working memory was phenomenologically characterized at three time scales: background feelings, strategies, and tactics. At the level of tactics, transmodality—the transformation of one modality of lived experience into another—was identified as the central dynamic during task performance.
The Qualitative Report
November 20, 2022
Aleš Oblak, Asena Boyadzhieva, Jaya Caporusso et al.
4 citations
Presence—both as objecthood and immersion—is not captured by any single sense but emerges from all available sensory knowledge as a disembodied sense of solidity. Based on 117 phenomenological interviews with 14 participants sampled across positive (e.g., sexual intimacy) and negative (e.g., psychopathology) circumstances, a grounded theory analysis indicates that presence is a transmodal phenomenon, relatable to how aspects of experience translate between sensory modalities. Its relation to lived space helps explain delusion formation as rooted in sensory alterations rather than belief changes. That presence in lived space need not match objective reality informs debates on whether presence is an amodal aspect of consciousness.
March 20, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Liam Korošec Hudnik, Anja Levačić et al.
1 citation
preprint
Psilocybin microdosing loosens mental structures, making thoughts less intense and thinking more flexible but less stable, while increasing the salience of external stimuli—sometimes making mundane activities more interesting, sometimes causing sensory overload. The experience is appraised more positively in highly structured environments. Momentary ecological assessments and retrospective interviews gave completely opposite accounts of the experience, highlighting profound methodological challenges in microdosing research. The findings relate to stable versus flexible cognition and the concept of salience, underscoring the need for systematic mixed-methods studies to better characterize the lived experience of psilocybin microdosing.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Aleš Oblak, Matic Kuclar, Katja Horvat Golob et al.
1 citation
A detailed case study of a patient with multiple psychiatric comorbidities, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and adverse childhood experiences followed for two years. Using phenomenological interviews, neuropsychological assessments, language analysis, and semi-structured interviews, a personalized network model of the patient's lifeworld was constructed. The core psychopathological theme identified was 'the crisis of objectivity'—a persistent mistrust of any information appraised as originating in his subjectivity, developmentally traceable to adverse childhood experiences and a psychotic episode. Correspondence was found between subjective reports and other data sources. Social sensorimotor, positive valence, and negative valence system dysfunctions likely relate to a primary deficit from childhood adversity, while cognitive symptoms may be tied to maladaptive coping mechanisms or the primary disorder.
Brain Sciences
January 7, 2026
Aleš Oblak, Sara Rigler, Liam Korošec Hudnik et al.
Patients with affective disorders experience emotional stimuli in laboratory tasks not as isolated events but as part of a complex, temporally unfolding process that can persist and blend across trials, a phenomenon termed impressionability. Two distinct alterations in affectivity were identified: affective enchantment, where intense emotions combine with superstitious thinking, and disintwinement, a sense of detachment and emotional blunting. Standardized image-based tasks often fail to elicit authentic spontaneous emotional responses in clinical populations, limiting their ecological validity. The findings underscore the need for experimental designs that capture the subtle, dynamic nature of altered affectivity, including vital feelings, to better understand emotion dysregulation.
Frontiers in psychiatry
January 1, 2026
Aleš Oblak, Sara Rigler, Nika Kovačič et al.
Ruminations are persistent, repetitive, distressing thoughts about negative events and moods, linked to psychiatric disorders and suicidality. This study provides a detailed description of ruminating from a lifeworld perspective, using micro-phenomenological interviews with 51 participants (107 interviews, 79 episodes). Ruminating is an epistemic practice driven by a need to resolve uncertainty after a collapse of commonsense understanding, leading to intellectualization and detachment from embodied responses. It involves paralysis, emptiness, and problematic relationships with knowledge. Rather than a maladaptive thought pattern, ruminating constitutes a complex lifeworld, suggesting a reconceptualization from a unified symptom to a system of interrelated altered experiences.