The multisensory basis of the self: From body to identity to others

Abstract

By grounding the self in the body, experimental psychology has taken the body as the starting point for a science of the self. One fundamental dimension of the bodily self is the sense of body ownership that refers to the special perceptual status of one’s own body, the feeling that “my body” belongs to me. The primary aim of this review article is to highlight recent advances in the study of body ownership and our understanding of the underlying neurocognitive processes in three ways. I first consider how the sense of body ownership has been investigated and elucidated in the context of multisensory integration. Beyond exteroception, recent studies have considered how this exteroceptively driven sense of body ownership can be linked to the other side of embodiment, that of the unobservable, yet felt, interoceptive body, suggesting that these two sides of embodiment interact to provide a unifying bodily self. Lastly, the multisensorial understanding of the self has been shown to have implications for our understanding of social relationships, especially in the context of self–other boundaries. Taken together, these three research strands motivate a unified model of the self inspired by current predictive coding models.

When less is more – Implicit preference for incomplete bodies in xenomelia

“…Second, a profound admiration for amputees up to a sexual attraction towards incomplete bodies has been described in some individuals with xenomelia (De Preester, 2013;First, 2005) and third, affected persons frequently pretend in private or public to be amputees. The perception of one's own and another person's body are intimately linked (Schilder, 1935), and sensorimotor processes are influenced by observation and imitation of others (de Guzman et al, 2016;Tsakiris, 2016). Such shared neural mechanisms are modulated by interpersonal relations (e.g.…”

How disentangled sense of agency and sense of ownership can interact with different emotional events on stress feelings

“…Besides recognizing the fake model hand as being part of their own body, participants also reported that they felt as if the touch they sensed originated from the location on the rubber hand where they saw the brush touching the rubber hand, rather than from their real hand (Makin, Holmes, & Ehrsson, 2008). Furthermore, recent studies show below rubber hand illusion implicate that the brain is capable of integrating "natural" visual input and direct corticalsomatosensory stimulation to create the multisensory perception that an artificial limb belongs to one's own body (Tsakiris, 2017;Collins et al 2017). …”

“…Sense of agency refers to the pre-reflective experience or sense that I am the cause or author of the movement, while sense of ownership is the pre-reflective experience or sense that a limb is part of one's body (Tsakiris, Schuetz-Bosbach, & Gallagher, 2007;Tsakiris, 2017). In normal experience of voluntary or willed action, sense of agency and sense of ownership coincide and are indistinguishable; in the case of involuntary movement, however, it is quite possible to distinguish these two senses (Gallagher, 2000a, b).…”

“…In an "additive" model, agency and ownership are strongly related, while an"independent" model holds agency and ownership differ in experiences quanlitatively (Tsakiris, Longo, & Haggard, 2010). Even though they have been approved to be driven by different kinds of information and related to different psychological functions (Tsakiris, 2017), it is necessary to consider both of these two experiences when studying how bodily states can affect emotional feelings. The available evidence can be taken to suggest that ownership and agency are strongly related to affective reactivity (Ma, Lippelt, & Hommel, 2017); however, it is more common to use emotional variables as stimuli to investigate their impact on agency and ownership but not vice versa.…”

Self-consciousness and intersubjectivity: dimensions of the social self

“…Cognitive neuroscientists shed an interesting light on the role of a sensory feedback system for the formation not only of a bodily self, but also for the distinction between self and others (Farmer & Tsakiris 2012, Tsakiris 2017. Further insights from cognitive science and developmental psychology suggest that self-consciousness develops in correlation with the development of a theory of mind (e.g., Happé 2003).…”