The recent distinction between sense of agency and sense of body-ownership has attracted considerable empirical and theoretical interest. The respective contributions of central motor signals and peripheral afferent signals to these two varieties of body experience remain unknown. In the present review, we consider the methodological problems encountered in the empirical study of agency and body-ownership, and we then present a series of experiments that study the interplay between motor and sensory information. In particular, we focus on how multisensory signals (...) interact with body representations to generate the sense of body-ownership, and how the sense of agency modulates the sense of body-ownership. Finally, we consider the respective roles of efferent and afferent signals for the experience of one’s own body and actions, in relation to self-recognition and the recognition of other people’s actions. We suggest that the coherent experience of the body depends on the integration of efferent information with afferent information in action contexts. Overall, whereas afferent signals provide the distinctive content of one’s own body experience, efferent signals seem to structure the experience of one’s own body in an integrative and coherent way. (shrink)

The “body image” is a putative mental representation of one’s own body, including structural and geometric details, as well as the more familiar visual and affective aspects. Very little research has investigated how we learn the structure of our own body, with most researchers emphasising the canonical visual representation of the body when we look at ourselves in a mirror. Here, we used non-visual self-touch in healthy participants to investigate the possibility that primary sensorimotor experience may influence cognitive representations of (...) one’s own body structure. Participants used the fingers of one hand , to touch the fingers of the other . A conflict between the experience of the active and passive hand was introduced by experimenter interleaving their fingers with the fingers of the participant’s passive hand. This led to the active hand experiencing that it touched more fingers than the passive hand felt it was being touched by. The effects on representation of body structure were assessed using an implicit measure based on Kinsbourne and Warrington’s ‘in-between task’. We found an underestimation of the number of fingers in the central part of the hand specifically linked to the experience of self-touch. This pattern of results corresponds to the experience of the passive hand, but not the active hand. Nevertheless, comparable reorganisation of fingers within the hand representation was found for both active and passive hands. We show that primary sensorimotor experience can modify the representation of body structure. This modification is driven by the passive experience of being touched, rather than by the active experience of touching. We believe this is the first experimental study of effects of self-touch on the mental representation of the body. (shrink)

The perception of sensory effects generated by one’s own actions is typically attenuated compared to the same effects generated externally. However, it is unclear whether this specifically relates to self-generation. Recent studies showed that sensory attenuation mainly relies on action preparation, not actual action execution. Hence, an attenuation of sensory effects generated by another person might occur if these actions can be anticipated and thus be prepared for.Here, we compared the perceived loudness of sounds generated by one’s own actions and (...) actions of another person that either could or could not be anticipated. We found an attenuation of the perceived loudness for self- as compared to other-generated sounds. This difference was independent of whether the sound-eliciting actions of the other person could be anticipated or not. Thus, sensory attenuation seems to be specifically tied to self-generation instead of being a secondary effect of agent-independent preparation for an upcoming action. (shrink)

Ideomotor theory of human action control proposes that activation of a motor representation can occur either through internally-intended or externally-perceived actions. Critically, sometimes these alternatives of eliciting a motor response may be conflicting, for example, when intending one action and perceiving another, necessitating the recruitment of enhanced action-control to avoid motor mimicry. Based on previous neuroimaging evidence, suggesting that reduced mimicry is associated with self-related processing, we aimed to experimentally enhance these action-control mechanisms during motor contagion by inducing self-focus. In (...) two within-subjects experiments, participants had to enforce their action intention against an external motor contagion tendency under heightened and normal self-focus. During high self-focus participants showed reduced motor mimicry, induced either by mirror self-observation or self-referential judgments. This indicates that a self-focus provoking situation can enhance online action-control mechanisms, needed to resist unintentional motor contagion tendencies and thereby enables a modulation of automatic mirroring responses. (shrink)

To what extent can we feel what someone else feels? Data from neuroscience suggest that empathy is supported by a simulation process, namely the neural activation of the same or similar regions that subserve the representation of specific states in the observer. However, expectations significantly modulate sensory input, including affective information. For example, expecting painful stimulation can decrease the neural signal and the subjective experience thereof. For an accurate representation of the other person’s state, such top-down processes would have to (...) be simulated as well. However, this is only partly possible, because expectations are usually acquired by learning. Therefore, it is important to be aware of possible misleading simulations that lead to misinterpretations of someone’s state. (shrink)