On the Role of Interoception in Body and Object Perception: A Multisensory-Integration Account

Abstract

Various “embodied perception” phenomena suggest that what people sense of their body shapes what they perceive of the environment and that what they perceive of the environment shapes what they perceive of their bodies. For example, an observer’s own hand can be felt where a fake hand is seen, events produced by own body movements seem to occur earlier than they did, and feeling a heavy weight at an observer’s back may prompt hills to look steeper. Here we argue that such and various other phenomena are instances of multisensory integration of interoceptive signals from the body and exteroceptive signals from the environment. This overarching view provides a mechanistic description of what embodiment in perception means and how it works. It suggests new research questions while questioning a special role of the body itself and various phenomenon-specific explanations in terms of ownership, agency, or action-related scaling of visual information.

No Evidence in Favour of the Existence of ‘Intentional’ Binding

“…It has been proposed that binding phenomena result from cue integration (Moore & Haggard, 2008;Moore & Fletcher, 2012;Moore et al, 2009;Wolpe et al, 2013), but this framework mainly relied so far on the role of efferent motor signals. The present findings stress and support the role of somatosensory information, in which efferent motor signals do not necessarily need to be present (Kirsch & Kunde, 2023;Kirsch et al, 2019).…”

Both stimulus‐specific and configurational features of multiple visual stimuli shape the spatial ventriloquism effect

“…Many paradigms probe multisensory binding using paradigms involving one stimulus per modality. Whether and how results obtained using these generalize to real-life multisensory object perception remains unclear (Badde et al, 2023;Bizley, Maddox, & Lee, 2016;Duarte et al, 2023;Kirsch & Kunde, 2023;Newell et al, 2023;Tovar et al, 2020). In a step towards this direction, we asked how the presence of two visual stimuli shapes multisensory perception in the audio-visual spatial ventriloquism paradigm.…”

Role of Immersive Virtual Reality in Motor Behaviour Decision-Making in Chronic Pain Patients

“…The concept of multisensory integration explains the convergent processes of sensory modalities (e.g., auditory, visual, tactile, proprioceptive, and nociceptive modalities) required to generate a unified and coherent perception [ 42 ]. Perceptual experiences are made possible by a dynamic integration of sensory signals (multisensory processing) from different modalities that are constantly updated to encode the representation and configuration of the body and its relationship to the environment [ 43 ]. Similarly, sensory information does not only include exteroception but also interoception [ 43 ].…”

“…Perceptual experiences are made possible by a dynamic integration of sensory signals (multisensory processing) from different modalities that are constantly updated to encode the representation and configuration of the body and its relationship to the environment [ 43 ]. Similarly, sensory information does not only include exteroception but also interoception [ 43 ].…”