Body perception, awareness, and illusions

Costantini, Marcello

doi:10.1002/wcs.1309

Cited by 29 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 81 publications

(175 reference statements)

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“…is part of the person's own body (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998). Similar illusions can be elicited for other body parts, including the whole body (Costantini, 2014;Kilteni et al 2015). A number of studies have shown that such manipulations of bodily selfawareness affect the processing of social information.…”

Section: Electronic Supplementary Materialsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain

Riečanský

Lengersdorff

Pfabigan

et al. 2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Empathy for another person's pain and feeling pain oneself seem to be accompanied by similar or shared neural responses. Such shared responses could be achieved by mapping the bodily states of others onto our own bodily representations. We investigated whether sensorimotor neural responses to the pain of others are increased when experimentally reducing perceived bodily distinction between the self and the other. Healthy adult participants watched video clips of the hands of ethnic ingroup or outgroup members being painfully penetrated by a needle syringe or touched by a cotton swab. Manipulating the video presentation to create a visuospatial overlap between the observer's and the target's hand increased the perceived bodily self-attribution of the target's hand. For both ingroup and outgroup targets, this resulted in increased neural responses to the painful injections (compared with nonpainful contacts), as indexed by desynchronizations of central mu and beta scalp rhythms recorded using electroencephalography. Furthermore, these empathy-related neural activations were stronger in participants who reported stronger bodily self-attribution of the other person's hand. Our findings provide further evidence that empathy for pain engages sensorimotor resonance mechanisms. They also indicate that reducing bodily self-other distinction may increase such resonance for ingroup as well as outgroup targets.

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Section: Electronic Supplementary Materialsmentioning

confidence: 86%

Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain

Riečanský

Lengersdorff

Pfabigan

et al. 2019

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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“…Since then, different researchers have used the class of bodily illusions—having the aforementioned RHI as the prototypical paradigm (Serino and Dakanalis, 2016) to study the mechanisms behind body experience and its link with higher cognitive processes. Although this perspective article does not focus on an in-depth discussion of body illusion studies, which have recently been reviewed and summarized elsewhere (Costantini, 2014; Dieguez and Lopez, 2016; Serino and Dakanalis, 2016), it is worth noting some of these studies whose results are relevant for the topic of this article. First, it has been demonstrated that illusory ownership over an invisible body reduces social anxiety responses (Guterstam et al, 2015a).…”

Section: The Emergence Of Embodied Medicinementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, the ownership over a dark-skinned rubber hand reduces implicit racial bias (Maister et al, 2013) while the illusory embodiment of a virtual child’s body causes implicit attitude changes (Banakou et al, 2013). Finally, and beside the view of body illusions as potential non-invasive approaches for rehabilitation with neurological and psychiatric (Costantini, 2014), it has been shown that efficient episodic-memory encoding requires perception of the world from the perspective of one’s own body (Bergouignan et al, 2014). …”

Section: The Emergence Of Embodied Medicinementioning

confidence: 99%

Embodied Medicine: Mens Sana in Corpore Virtuale Sano

Riva

Serino

Lernia

et al. 2017

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Progress in medical science and technology drastically improved physicians’ ability to interact with patient’s physical body. Nevertheless, medicine still addresses the human body from a Hippocratic point of view, considering the organism and its processes just as a matter of mechanics and fluids. However, the interaction between the cognitive neuroscience of bodily self-consciousness (BSC), fundamentally rooted in the integration of multisensory bodily inputs, with virtual reality (VR), haptic technologies and robotics is giving a new meaning to the classic Juvenal’s latin dictum “Mens sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind in a healthy body). This vision provides the basis for a new research field, “Embodied Medicine”: the use of advanced technologies for altering the experience of being in a body with the goal of improving health and well-being. Up to now, most of the research efforts in the field have been focused upon how external bodily information is processed and integrated. Despite the important results, we believe that existing bodily illusions still need to be improved to enhance their capability to effectively correct pathological dysfunctions. First, they do not follow the suggestions provided by the free-energy and predictive coding approaches. More, they lacked to consider a peculiar feature of the human body, the multisensory integration of internal inputs (interoceptive, proprioceptive and vestibular) that constitute our inner body dimension. So, a future challenge is the integration of simulation/stimulation technologies also able to measure and modulate this internal/inner experience of the body. Finally, we also proposed the concept of “Sonoception” as an extension of this approach. The core idea is to exploit recent technological advances in the acoustic field to use sound and vibrations to modify the internal/inner body experience.

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“…Behavioural evidence from the literature on the rubber hand illusion (RHI) supports the idea that ability of the brain to generate probabilistic predictions of upcoming events has a role to play in the plasticity of our multisensory body representation (Ferri et al ., , ). In the original version of the illusion (Botvinick & Cohen, ; Tsakiris & Haggard, ; Costantini, ; Tsakiris, ), after synchronous visuo‐tactile stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant's hidden hand, participants reported feeling of ownership towards the former (Tsakiris & Haggard, ; Costantini & Haggard, ; Thakkar et al ., ). Recently, we showed that the RHI can be induced even if tactile stimuli are merely expected, rather than experienced (Ferri et al ., , ; for different findings, see Guterstam et al ., ; but see Ferri & Costantini, for a commentary).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of expectation in multisensory body representation – neural evidence

Ferri

Ambrosini

Pinti³

et al. 2017

Eur J of Neuroscience

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Sensory events contribute to body ownership, the feeling that the body belongs to me. However, the encoding of sensory events is not only reactive, but also proactive in that our brain generates prediction about forthcoming stimuli. In previous studies, we have shown that prediction of sensory events is a sufficient condition to induce the sense of body ownership. In this study, we investigated the underlying neural mechanisms. Participants were seated with their right arm resting upon a table just below another smaller table. Hence, the real hand was hidden from the participant's view and a life-sized rubber model of a right hand was placed on the small table in front of them. Participants observed a wooden plank while approaching - without touching - the rubber hand. We measured the phenomenology of the illusion by means of questionnaire. Neural activity was recorded by means of near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Results showed higher activation of multisensory parietal cortices in the rubber hand illusion induced by touch expectation. Furthermore, such activity was correlated with the subjective feeling of owning the rubber hand. Our results enrich current models of body ownership suggesting that our multisensory brain regions generate prediction on what could be my body and what could not. This finding might have interesting implications in all those cases in which body representation is altered, anorexia, bulimia nervosa and obesity, among others.

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Body perception, awareness, and illusions

Abstract: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Cited by 29 publications

References 81 publications

Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain

Increasing self-other bodily overlap increases sensorimotor resonance to others’ pain

Embodied Medicine: Mens Sana in Corpore Virtuale Sano

The role of expectation in multisensory body representation – neural evidence

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