The Development of a Cross-Modal Sense of Body Ownership

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the contribution of tactile and proprioceptive cues to the development of the sense of body ownership by testing the susceptibility of 4- to 5-year-old children, 8- to 9-year-old children, and adults to the somatic rubber-hand illusion (SRHI). We found that feelings of owning a rubber hand in the SHRI paradigm, as assessed by explicit reports (i.e., questionnaire), are already present by age 4 and do not change throughout development. In contrast, the effect of the illusion on the sense of hand position, as assessed by a pointing task, was present only in 8- to 9-year-old children and adults; the magnitude of such capture increased with age. Our findings reveal that tactile-proprioceptive interactions contributed differently to the two aspects characterizing the SRHI: Although the contribution of such interactions to an explicit sense of self was similar across age groups, their contribution to the more implicit recalibration of hand position is still developing by age 9.

The developing bodily self: How posture constrains body representation in childhood

“…Both the proprioceptive drift measure and subjective ratings demonstrate that bottomup multisensory information from vision, touch and proprioception drives body representation for both children and adults. This is consistent with previous findings (Cowie et al, 2013(Cowie et al, , 2016Greenfield, Ropar, Smith, Carey, & Newport, 2015;Nava et al, 2017): Visual-tactile spatiotemporal correlations are used to establish a sense of ownership over the viewed hand (questionnaire), a sense of touch on it (questionnaire), and a sense of hand position near it (proprioceptive drift). Our novel finding is that children (as do adults), apply top-down knowledge of the possible posture of their body to constrain body representation.…”

“…Preferential looking studies have shown that newborns and young infants can detect multisensory visual-tactile, visual-interoceptive, auditory-tactile and visual-motor congruencies (Filippetti, Johnson, Lloyd-Fox, Dragovic, & Farroni, 2013;Freier, Mason, & Bremner, 2016;Maister, Tang, & Tsakiris, 2017;Rochat & Morgan, 1995;Thomas et al, 2018;Zmyj, Jank, Schütz-Bosbach, & Daum, 2011). Recent work has used the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) to test the sensory bases of body representation in older children from the age of four to thirteen years (Cowie et al, 2013(Cowie et al, , 2016Nava, Bolognini, & Turati, 2017). In this illusion (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998; for review see Tsakiris, 2010), synchronous stroking with a paintbrush on a hidden real hand and visible fake hand (visuotactile correlation) can lead to the illusion that the fake hand is the participant's own, and to the drift of perceived hand position towards the fake hand ('proprioceptive drift', see Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005).…”

“…These illusory percepts occur in both adults and four-to thirteen-year-olds, indicating that, from the age of four years, multisensory visuotactile information, i.e. bottom-up information, drives a subjective sense of bodily identity and location (Cowie et al, 2013(Cowie et al, , 2016Nava et al, 2017).…”

Roles of the right temporo‐parietal and premotor cortices in self‐location and body ownership

“…For example, using the RHI as a read‐out of plastic cortical remapping after deafferentation, Scandola and colleagues reported the absence of proprioceptive bias, with preserved perceptual illusion of ownership for the rubber hand in spinal cord injured patients. The association between objective and subjective indexes of the RHI also changes throughout the development (Nava, Bolognini, & Turati, ).…”

Trait-Based Emotional Intelligence, Body Image Dissatisfaction, and HRQoL in Children

“…Furthermore, when trying to understand how body dissatisfaction occurs and evolves through the developmental spectrum, it is worth taking into consideration that body image is strongly related to the holistic experience of embodiment (awareness that my body belongs to me), which reflects the attunement between the inner states (emotions, cognitions etc.) and the body (17)(18)(19)(20) and has been found to be present even in early childhood (17,21). Embodiment can also be regarded as a precondition for social relatedness (22,23), which plays a central role in children's developing healthy lifestyle (24).…”