Visual consciousness and bodily self-consciousness

Abstract

Purpose of reviewIn recent years, consciousness has become a central topic in cognitive neuroscience. This review focuses on the relation between bodily self-consciousness -the feeling of being a subject in a body -and visual consciousness -the subjective experience associated with the perception of visual signals. Recent findingsFindings from clinical and experimental work have shown that bodily self-consciousness depends on specific brain networks and is related to the integration of signals from multiple sensory modalities including vision. In addition, recent experiments have shown that visual consciousness is shaped by the body, including vestibular, tactile, proprioceptive, and motor signals. SummarySeveral lines of evidence suggest reciprocal relationships between vision and bodily signals, indicating that a comprehensive understanding of visual and bodily self-consciousness requires studying them in unison.

From multisensory integration in peripersonal space to bodily self‐consciousness: from statistical regularities to statistical inference

“…As we put forward in the rest of this section, an array of bodily illusions—all dependent on classical principles of multisensory integration—has been described and utilized to scrutinize the neurobiological underpinning of bodily self‐consciousness. Furthermore, more recently, these illusions, because of their impact of bodily self‐consciousness, have been used to demonstrate the link between the latter and other aspects of perception and cognition . Indeed, as we highlight below, a major novel area of inquiry relates to the plasticity of bodily self‐consciousness and leverages this feature in social cognition .…”

Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Principles of Bodily Self-Consciousness

“…Early data regarding the neural correlates of consciousness arguably came from clinical observations in neurological patients (i.e., (Poppel et al, 1973;Weiskrantz et al, 1974;Bisiach et al, 1979), empowered by psychophysics and, more recently, brain imaging (i.e., Kim and Blake, 2005;Sergent and Dehaene, 2004). Although these studies have led to a better understanding of visual consciousness, the interaction of conscious and unconscious vision with other senses has remained largely unexplored, although it is a crucial element given the multisensory nature of consciousness (Deroy et al, 2014;Faivre et al, 2014Faivre et al, , 2015.…”

Numerical Priming Between Touch and Vision Depends on Tactile Discrimination

“…To test the first hypothesis, one could investigate lower level forms of unconscious tactile processing, for instance, involving a single subliminal tap as an attentional cue. As for the second hypothesis, one may restore tactovisual transfer by using a common reference frame between touch and vision, as bodily signals including touch and proprioception are known to impact vision (for a review, see Faivre, Salomon, & Blanke, 2015). Notably, proprioceptive (Salomon, Lim, Herbelin, Hesselmann, & Blanke, 2013) and tactile signals (Lunghi et al, 2010) are known to influence conscious access during binocular suppression.…”

“…Yet, a multimodal study of consciousness seems necessary in order to fully understand the origins of phenomenal experience (Faivre, Salomon, & Blanke, 2015). In addition, the sense of touch is held to be of crucial importance for bodily selfconsciousness, that is, the sense of owning one's body and perceiving the world from an embodied first-person perspective (Blanke, 2012).…”