An ontogenetically-informed epistemology is necessary to understandings of apprenticeship learning. The methodology required in this enterprise is a constructive phenomenology, a phenomenology that takes into account the fact that as infants, we were apprentices of our own bodies: we all learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves. The major focus of this essay is on infant social relationships that develop on the ground of our original corporeal-kinetic apprenticeship. It shows how joint attention, imitation, and turn-taking - all (...) richly examined areas in infant social development - are the foundation of apprenticeship learning in later adult life. The relationship between each infant capacity and later apprenticeship learning is demonstrated in examples from present-day research, specifically, research in the areas of medicine, sport, music, and tailoring, and research carried out by philosophers on apprenticeship learning. (shrink)

This article concerns kime, a somatic code used in the ‘empty hand’ Japanese martial art of karate. Kime is a tactile-kinesthetic entity born out of practice, coming into being in a social setting through the specific organization of the body-self, fusing body and self into one stance and movement. Kime is entirely embodied, yet can only be operated and recognized inter-subjectively. It plays a crucial role in combat and at the same time also indicates a spiritual possibility that (...) depends on eradication of emotion and volition. An analysis of kime shows how cultural understandings can emerge without necessarily using symbolic representations or verbal discourse in their construction. These somatic non-dual understandings can come to form an entire world-of-meaning directly through the moving body. The moving body shapes itself within itself even as it interacts with and contributes to shape its immediate environment. This is a world-of-meaning that includes complex inter-subjectivity founded on the speed and ambiguity of the interface between the innerness and the outerness of the body. (shrink)

In a recent study (Chen et al., 2018), we conducted a series of experiments that induced the “four-hand illusion”: using a head-mounted display (HMD), the participant adopted the experimenter’s first-person perspective (1PP) as if it was his/her own 1PP. The participant saw four hands via the HMD: the experimenter’s two hands from the adopted 1PP and the subject’s own two hands from the adopted third-person perspective (3PP). In the active four-hand condition, the participant tapped his/her index fingers, imitated by the (...) experimenter. Once all four hands acted synchronously and received synchronous tactile stimulations at the same time, many participants felt as if they owned two more hands. In this paper, we argue that there is a philosophical implication of this novel illusion. According to Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) and Legrand (2010), one can experience one’s own body or body-part either as-object or as-subject but cannot experience it as both simultaneously, i.e., these two experiences are mutually exclusive. Call this view the Experiential Exclusion Thesis. We contend that a key component of the four-hand illusion—the subjective experience of the 1PP-hands that involved both “kinesthetic sense of movement” and “visual sense of movement” (the movement that the participant sees via the HMD)—provides an important counter-example against this thesis. We argue that it is possible for a healthy subject to experience the same body-part both as-subject and as-object simultaneously. Our goal is not to annihilate the distinction between body-as-object and body-as-subject, but to show that it is not as rigid as suggested by the phenomenologists. (shrink)

Three methodologically distinctive empirical studies of the emotions carry forward Darwin's work on the emotions, vindicate Sperry's finding that the brain is an organ of and for movement, and implicitly affirm that affectivity is tied to the tactile-kinesthetic body. A phenomenological analysis of movement deepens these empirical findings by showing how the dynamic character of movement gives rise to kinetic qualia. Analysis of the qualitative structure of movement shows in turn how motion and emotion are dynamically congruent. Three (...) experiences of fear are presented--phenomenological, ethological, and literary--to demonstrate the dynamic congruency. Five implications follow from the analysis, including the implications that movement is not equivalent to behavior, experience is not physiological activity, and a brain is not a body. (shrink)

Developmental and clinical psychological findings on infancy over the past twenty years and more refute in striking ways both Piaget's and Lacan's negative characterizations of infants. Piaget's thesis is that the infant has an undifferentiated sense of self; Lacan's thesis is that the infant is no more than a fragmented piece of goods — a corps morcelé. Through an examination of recent and notable analyses of infancy by infant psychiatrist Daniel Stern, this paper highlights important features within the radically different (...) accounts. In particular, it examines Stern's account of self-agency —a facet of the core self. In doing so, the paper brings to light corporeal matters of fact and shows :how recent developmental-clinical data on infants accord with facets of bodily life described by Husserl. The paper contrasts these corporeal matters of fact and facets of bodily life with Piaget's and Lacan's notion of an infant as incompetent and deficient. On the basis of its empirical-phenomenological findings, the paper underscores the need to recognize the richness of nonverbal life and to give movement and the tactile-kinesthetic body their conceptual due. (shrink)

As its title indicates, this article shows animation to be the fundamental, essential, and properly descriptive concept to understandings of animate life. A critical and constructive path is taken toward an illumination of these threefold dimensions of animation. The article is critical in its attention to a central linguistic formulation in cognitive neuroscience, namely, enaction ; it is constructive in setting forth an analysis of affectivity as exemplar of a staple of animate life, elucidating its biological and existential foundations in (...) animation. (shrink)

Human perception has long been a critical subject of design thinking. While various studies have stressed the link between thinking and acting, particularly in spatial experience, the term “design thinking” seems to disconnect conceptual thinking from physical expression or process. Spatial perception is multimodal and fundamentally bound to the body that is not a mere receptor of sensory stimuli but an active agent engaged with the perceivable environment. The body apprehends the experience in which one’s kinesthetic engagement and knowledge (...) play an essential role. Although design disciplines have integrated the abstract, metaphoric, and visual aspects of the body and its movement into conceptual thinking, studies have pointed out that design disciplines have emphasized visuality above the other sensory domains and heavily engaged with the perception of visual configurations, relying on the Gestalt principles. Gestalt psychology must be valued for its attention to a whole. However, the theories of design elements and principles over-empathizing such visuality posit the aesthetics of design mainly as visual value and understate other sensorial and perceptual aspects. Although the visual approach may provide a practical means to represent and communicate ideas, a design process heavily driven by visuality can exhibit weaknesses undermining certain aspects of spatial experience despite the complexity. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of multisensory perception, this article discusses the relationship between body awareness and spatial perception and its implication for design disciplines concerning built environments. Special attention is given to the concepts of kinesthetic and synesthetic phenomena known as multisensory and cross-sensory, respectively. This discussion integrates the corporeal and spatiotemporal realms of human experience into the discourse of kinesthetic and synesthetic perceptions. Based on the conceptual, theoretical, and precedent analyses, this article proposes three models for design thinking: Synesthetic Translation, Kinesthetic Resonance, and Kinesthetic Engagement. To discuss the concepts rooted in action-based perception and embodied cognition, this study borrows the neurological interpretation of haptic perception, interoception, and proprioception of space. This article suggests how consideration of the kinesthetic or synesthetic body can deepen and challenge the existing models of the perceptual aspects of environmental psychology adopted in design disciplines. (shrink)

Tactile distance perception is believed to require that immediate afferent signals be referenced to a stored representation of body size and shape (the body model). For this ability, recent studies have reported that the stored body representations involved are highly distorted, at least in the case of the hand, with the hand dorsum represented as wider and squatter than it actually is. Here, we aim to define the neural basis of this phenomenon. In a behavioural experiment participants estimated the (...) distance between touches on two points by adjusting the length of a visually-presented line on the screen. The technique of multidensional scaling (MDS) was used to reconstruct a perceptual map of tactile space. Analysis of spatial distortion using Procrustes alignment showed that maps were stretched in the mediolateral hand axis. In order to determine the neural correlates of these body distortions, we performed an fMRI study. For each participant, we used a searchlight pattern classifier with Euclidean distance on pre-defined regions of interests (ROIs). In order to relate the representations between the different points and to computational models, we compare response-pattern dissimilarity matrices in these ROIs. Similar to the behavioural experiment, we used MDS to reconstruct maps of the neural representation of tactile space using the values from the dissimilarities matrices. We were able to reconstruct the perceptual map of tactile space in the contralateral primary somatosensory and motor cortices. This suggests that these areas are critical to generate the tactile representations of the dorsum of the hand. (shrink)

Jeder Wahrnehmung liegen Kinästhesen zugrunde, doch tritt die Bewegung am deutlichsten im Tasten hervor. Untersucht wird hier die phänomenologische Auffassung vom Zusammenhang zwischen Tasten und Kinästhesen bei Husserl und Erwin Straus, im Vergleich zu der Tanzwissenschaft . Diese Interpretation wird teilweise durch andere Perspektiven ergänzt, die aus der pränatalen Anthropologie, Psychiatrie und den Ingenieurwissenschaften stammen. Das Vorbild ist bei Husserl die mechanische Bewegung zu Erkenntniszwecken; Straus entdeckt die Tierwelt und ihre appetitiven Bewegungen. Keine von diesen Analysen entspricht völlig dem Phänomen (...) des Tanzes als Ausdruck der propriozeptiv empfundenen Harmonie zwischen dem Leib und seiner Welt. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown the importance of integrating multisensory information in the body representation for constituting self-consciousness. However, one idea that has received only scant attention is that our body representation is also constituted by knowledge of bodily visual characteristics . Here in two experiments we used a full body crossmodal congruency task in which visual distractors were presented on a photograph of the participant, another person, who was either familiar or unfamiliar, or an object. Results revealed that during the (...) ‘self-condition’ CCEs were enhanced compared to the ‘other condition’. The CCE was similar for unfamiliar and familiar others. CCEs for the object condition were significantly smaller. The results show that presentation of an irrelevant image of a body affects multimodal processing and that the effect is enhanced when that image is of the self. The results hold intriguing implications for body representation in social situations. (shrink)

Change blindness, the surprising inability of people to detect significant changes between consecutively-presented visual displays, has recently been shown to affect tactile perception as well. Visual change blindness has been observed during saccades and eye blinks, conditions under which people’s awareness of visual information is temporarily suppressed. In the present study, we demonstrate change blindness for suprathreshold tactile stimuli resulting from the execution of a secondary task requiring bodily movement. In Experiment 1, the ability of participants to detect (...) changes between two sequentially-presented vibrotactile patterns delivered on their arms and legs was compared while they performed a secondary task consisting of either the execution of a movement with the right arm toward a visual target or the verbal identification of the target side. The results demonstrated that a motor response gave rise to the largest drop in perceptual sensitivity in detecting changes to the tactile display. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results under conditions in which the participants had to detect tactile changes while turning a steering wheel instead. These findings are discussed in terms of the role played by bodily movements, sensory suppression, and higher order information processing in modulating people’s awareness of tactile information across the body surface. (shrink)

Soft robots promise an exciting design trajectory in the field of robotics and human–robot interaction (HRI), promising more adaptive, resilient movement within environments as well as a safer, more sensitive interface for the objects or agents the robot encounters. In particular, tactile HRI is a critical dimension for designers to consider, especially given the onrush of assistive and companion robots into our society. In this article, we propose to surface an important set of ethical challenges for the field of (...) soft robotics to meet. Tactile HRI strongly suggests that soft-bodied robots balance tactile engagement against emotional manipulation, model intimacy on the bonding with a tool not with a person, and deflect users from personally and socially destructive behavior the soft bodies and surfaces could normally entice. (shrink)

It seems that there are important differences concerning the way in which space itself is presented in visual and tactile modalities. In the case of vision, it is usually accepted that visual objects are experienced as located in a visual field. However, it is controversial whether similar field-like characteristics can be attributed to the space in which tactile entities are experienced to be located. The paper investigates whether postulating the presence of a tactile field is justified. I (...) argue that the answer is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ due to the dual nature of touch: touch is both an interoceptive modality that presents states of one’s body and an exteroceptive modality that presents external entities. More specifically, the interoceptive tactile space has a character of a spatial field. On the other hand, the exteroceptive tactile space does not have characteristics necessary for ascribing the field-status. (shrink)

This experiment used event-related potentials to study the tactile-visual information conflict processing in a tactile-visual pairing task and its modulation by tactile-induced emotional states. Eighteen participants were asked to indicate whether the tactile sensation on their body matched or did not match the expected tactile sensation associated with the object depicted in an image. The type of tactile-visual stimuli and the valence of tactile-induced emotional states were manipulated following a 2 × 2 factorial (...) design. Electrophysiological analyses revealed a mismatched minus matched negative difference component between 420 and 620 ms after stimulus onset in the negative tactile-induced emotional state condition. This ND420-620 component was considered as a sign of the cross-modal conflict processing during the processing of incongruent tactile-visual information. In contrast, no significant mismatched minus matched negative difference component was found in the positive tactile-induced emotional state condition. Together, these results support the hypothesis that a positive emotional state induced by a positive tactile stimulation improves tactile-visual conflict processing abilities. (shrink)

This article offers critical and constructive perspectives essential to understanding living bodies, and, in effect, to showing that kinesthesia, tactility and affectivity matter because they are central to animate life. Critical perspectives focus on practices that distance us from the lived realities of animate nature, on insights into those realities, and on ways in which language is intimately related to those realities. Constructive perspectives focus on ontogenetic studies that empirically testify to our being animate organisms from the start. The (...) studies validate Husserl’s insight into the developmental progression from ‘I move’ to ‘I do’ to ‘I can’. On the basis of these perspectives, concluding observations focus on the mutual validation of empirical and phenomenological research, on the distinction between movement and objects in motion, on the distinction between perceiving and feeling one’s body, and on the distinction between having a body and being a body. (shrink)

Because philosophical reflections on touch usually start from our ability to perceive properties of objects, they tend to overlook features of touch that are crucial to correct understanding of tactual perception. This paper brings out these features and uses them to develop a general reconception of the sense of touch. I start by taking a fresh look at our ability to feel, in order to reveal its vital role. This sheds a different light on the skin's perceptual potential. While it (...) is commonly observed that tactile experiences have two intentional objects, an external object and one's own body, I will advance a more accurate alternative: in tactile experiences, one becomes aware of what one's body undergoes. This alternative not only fits better with tactility's vital role; it is also key to explaining how active touching provides for a unique contribution to our perceptual relation to material objects. By thus connecting tactility's vital role to the way we rely on touch while manipulating objects, this essay offers a cross-sectional survey of our tactile powers that reveals the interplay between sensing and touching. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to draw important parallels between the way in which configured pictorial practices of early Cubism interpreted the idea of tactile space and the phenomenological concept of existential spatiality. It is argued that in dispensing with the “illusion of perspectival space” and deconstructing geometrical perspective, several Cubist artists developed a position of multi-perspectival realism with respect to what remains ungraspable in the three-dimensional visual rendering of space. Tactile space is the main theme (...) of early Cubist painting. Tactility remains concealed by linear perspective and three-dimensional space, and existentially primordial tactile space turns out to be the ungraspable which Cubist experiments has to disclose. At the same time, these artists succeeded in avoiding any kind of a reification of space as something that statically embraces what is situated in it. The paper is also preoccupied with Cubist “geometrical experimentation”. The claim is defended that it is precisely this experimentation that most essentially anticipates Heidegger’s analyses of the spatiality of the ready-to-hand and the spatiality of being-in-the-world. Parallels are also drawn with Merleau-Ponty’s spatiality of the perceiving-tactile body which was chiefly focused on the presupposition that the visibility attained through visual perception is imbued with invisibility stemming from the immediate tactility relating the perceiving body and the perceived entities – a presupposition shared by the early Cubists and the French phenomenologist. (shrink)

This article offers an analysis of embodied experiences and connections in social salsa dancing. Framed within a theoretical context that views bodily practices as both the enactment of normative ideals and as a negotiation of personal freedom against normative ideals, social salsa dancing offers a rich empirical context to explore how we make sense of our bodies, bodily practices, and embodied experience. Drawing on fieldwork conducted as part of a doctoral study in addition to a decade of personal experience, (...) I argue that social salsa dancing cultivates kinesthetic, tactile, and musical senses, and emphasizes the value of attentive embodied interactions and momentary connections with others. I conclude that exploring the possibilities of these interactions and connections offers a potentially emancipatory way of working on one’s embodied self. (shrink)

Engaging with the specific ways current media technologies interact with, or directly access the human body, we suggest developing a ‘symmetrical’ theory of touch. Critically referring to Bruno Latour’s invocation of ‘symmetrical anthropology’, we reconsider tactile agency as ‘technological agency’, arguing that the concept of touch – traditionally viewed as an exclusively human ability – should be extended to non-human actors and analysed in view of the cultural logic of capitalism. Its systematic focus, then, is on the productive intersections (...) and contact zones between biology and technology: from phenomena of non-human touch in industrial production to the material touching taking place in the instrumental grasp on the living in the 19th-century physiological laboratories and the invisible operations of tracing, tracking and sensing taking place in the technological milieus of today’s environments. In highlighting the tactile dimension of digital modernity and its economic genealogies, this article aims to advance a combined concept of human and non-human touch which provides a crucial angle for reconsidering bodies and technologies in the age of ubiquitous computing. (shrink)

Empathy and sympathy are feeling-acts which bring the self into direct encounter with other persons. In empathy a self grasps the affective act of another self; in sympathy x n persons apprehend a common object while immersed in similar feeling acts. Since touch is the paradigmatic sense for bringing what is felt into proximity with feeling, structural affinities between touch and these feeling acts can be shown. This relationship has been obscured by classical theories of touch in which it is (...) interpreted on analogy with the other senses. When the subject of touch is seen as the living body as a whole, the full range of its possible relationships to affective states can be explored. In this connection the theories of touch of Aristotle, Berkeley and Condillac are critically evaluated. While none recognizes the uniqueness of touch, each sees difficulties in incorporating touch in a general theory of sense. In the course of the exposition pity is distinguished from empathy and sympathy and a criticism of Nietzsche's ressentiment theory offered. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Written over a span of more than two decades, the essays by Iris Marion Young collected in this volume describe diverse aspects of women's lived body experience in modern Western societies. Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that (...) continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing. While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education. (shrink)

Body ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a (...) rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness. (shrink)

We have previously found that attention to internal somatic sensations during a heart beat perception task increases the misperception of external touch on a somatic signal detection task , during which healthy participants erroneously report feeling near-threshold vibrations presented to their fingertip in the absence of a stimulus. However, it has been suggested that mindful interoceptive attention should result in more accurate somatic perception, due to its non-evaluative and controlled nature. To investigate this possibility, 62 participants completed the SSDT before (...) and after a period of brief body-scan mindfulness meditation training, or a control intervention . The meditation intervention reduced tactile misperception and increased sensitivity during the SSDT. This finding suggests that the perceptual effects of interoceptive attention depend on its particular nature, and raises the possibility that body-scan meditation could reduce the misperception of physical symptoms in individuals with medically unexplained symptoms. (shrink)

Human adaptive behavior in sensorimotor control is aimed to increase the confidence in feedforward mechanisms when sensory afferents are uncertain. It is thought that these feedforward mechanisms rely on predictions from internal models. We investigate whether the brain uses an internal model of physical laws to help estimate body equilibrium when tactile inputs from the foot sole are depressed by carrying extra weight. As direct experimental evidence for such a model is limited, we used Judoka athletes thought to have (...) built up internal models of external loads as compared with Non-Athlete participants and Dancers. Using electroencephalography, we first tested the hypothesis that the influence of tactile inputs was amplified by descending cortical efferent signals. We compared the amplitude of P1N1 somatosensory cortical potential evoked by electrical stimulation of the foot sole in participants standing still with their eyes closed. We showed smaller P1N1 amplitudes in the Load compared to No Load conditions in both Non-Athletes and Dancers. This decrease neural response to tactile stimulation was associated with greater postural oscillations. By contrast in the Judoka’s group, the neural early response to tactile stimulation was unregulated in the Load condition. This suggests that the brain can selectively increase the functional gain of sensory inputs, during challenging equilibrium tasks when tactile inputs were mechanically depressed by wearing a weighted vest. In Judokas, the activation of regions such as the right posterior inferior parietal cortex as early as the P1N1 is likely the source of the neural responses being maintained similar in both Load and No Load conditions. An overweight internal model stored in the right PPC known to be involved in maintaining a coherent representation of one’s body in space can optimize predictive mechanisms in situations with high balance constraints. This hypothesis has been confirmed by showing that postural reaction evoked by a translation of the support surface on which participants were standing wearing extra-weight was improved in Judokas. (shrink)

In his experimental studies on tactile recognition, the German neurologist Kurt Goldstein observes a peculiar ‘twitching movement’ of the body in neurologically impaired patients suffering from mind-blindness. Drawing on Goldstein’s interpretation of these bodily movements as kinaesthetic reactions, the present article advances a symmetrical conception of tactility that relocates the bipolarity of the sense of touch within the human body. In line with this symmetrical approach, the kinaesthetic reactions will be construed as tactile self-activation or self-touch of the (...) body and conceptualized, following Michael Polanyi’s epistemological notion, as the ‘tacit dimension of touch’. Combining neuropathological aspects with a media theoretical and epistemological trajectory, this article aims at re-evaluating the centrality of the registers of the sense of touch as the fundamental ground for grasping the world in its concrete encounters as well as in its symbolic abstractions. (shrink)

The concept of empathy describes our capacity to understand the emotions and intentions of others and to relate to our conspecifics. Numerous studies investigated empathy as a state as well as a stable personality trait. For example, recent studies in neuroscience suggest, among other brain areas such as the insula or the ACC, a role of the somatosensory cortices for empathy. Since the classic understanding of the primary somatosensory cortex is to represent touch on the body surface, we here aimed (...) to test whether tactile performance is linked to the personality trait empathy. To test this, we examined the tactile acuity of 95 healthy participants by using a two-point discrimination threshold task at the index fingers. Trait empathy was assessed by employing the interpersonal reactivity index, which measures self-reported empathy with four scales. Results of regression analyses suggested the subscale empathic concern to be positively associated with performance in the tactile acuity task. We discuss this finding in the light of recent studies on empathy and consider possible implications of tactile training to enhance empathy. (shrink)

Recent studies of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) have shown that the sense of body ownership is constrained by several factors and yet is still very flexible. However, exactly how flexible is our sense of body ownership? In this study, we address this issue by investigating the following question: is it possible that one may have the illusory experience of owning four hands? Under visual manipulation, the participant adopted the experimenter’s first-person perspective (1PP) as if it was his/her own. Sitting (...) face to face, the participant saw four hands—the experimenter’s two hands from the adopted 1PP together with the subject’s own two hands from the adopted third-person perspective (3PP). We found that: (1) the four-hand illusion did not occur in the passive four-hand condition. (2) In the active four-hand condition, the participants tapped their index fingers, imitated by the experimenter. When tactile stimulations were not provided, the key illusion was not induced, either. (3) Strikingly, once all four hands began to act with the same pattern and received synchronous tactile stimulations at the same time, many participants felt as if they had two more hands. These results show that the sense of body ownership is much more flexible than most researchers have suggested. (shrink)

We investigated how motor agency in the voluntary control of body movement influences body awareness. In the Rubber Hand Illusion , synchronous tactile stimulation of a rubber hand and the participant’s hand leads to a feeling of the rubber hand being incorporated in the participant’s own body. One quantifiable behavioural correlate of the illusion is an induced shift in the perceived location of the participant’s hand towards the rubber hand. Previous studies showed that the induced changes in body awareness (...) are local and fragmented: the proprioceptive drift is largely restricted to the stimulated finger. In the present study, we investigated whether active and passive movements, rather than tactile stimulation, would lead to similarly fragmented body awareness. Participants watched a projected image of their hand under three conditions: active finger movement, passive finger movement, and tactile stimulation. Visual feedback was either synchronous or asynchronous with respect to stimulation of the hand. A significant overall RHI, defined as greater drifts following synchronous than asynchronous stimulation, was found in all cases. However, the distribution of the RHI across stimulated and non-stimulated fingers depended on the kind of stimulation. Localised proprioceptive drifts, specific to the stimulated finger, were found for tactile and passive stimulation. Conversely, during active movement of a single digit, the proprioceptive drifts were not localised to that digit, but were spread across the whole hand. Whereas a purely proprioceptive sense of body-ownership is local and fragmented, the motor sense of agency integrates distinct body-parts into a coherent, unified awareness of the body. (shrink)

Recent evidence has identified the N140cc lateralized component of event-related potentials as a reliable index of the deployment of attention to task-relevant items in touch. However, existing ERP studies have presented the tactile search array to participants' limbs, most often to the hands. Here, we investigated distractor interference effects when the tactile search array was presented to a portion of the body that is less lateralized and peripheral compared to the hands. Participants were asked to localize a (...) class='Hi'>tactile target presented among distractors in a circular arrangement to their back. The N140cc was elicited contralateral to the target when the singleton distractor was absent. Its amplitude was reduced when the singleton distractor was present and contralateral to the target, suggesting that attention was directed at least in part to the distractor when the singletons are on opposite sides. However, similar N140cc were observed when the singleton distractor was ipsilateral to the target compared to distractor absent trials. We suggest that when target and singleton distractor are ipsilateral, the exact localization of the target requires the attentional processing of all items on the same side of the array, similar to distractor absent trials. Together, these observations replicate the distractor interference effects previously observed for the hands, suggesting that analogous mechanisms guide attentional selectivity across different body parts. (shrink)

Throughout history, the concepts of phantasia or imaginatio have been linked to the concept of the human body and in particular to our sensory perceptions. But phantasia/imaginatio have also always been linked to the mind and how the operations of the mind are connected with bodily sensations. Functioning as interface between the senses and the mind, phantasia has predominantly been exemplified with the notion of the visual image, rather than a tactile or oral depiction. But as emphatic as discussion (...) of the image has been, in particular throughout the Renaissance period and again in modernity, it has hardly been linked to the contemporaneous technology of imagery that accompanied the theoretical discourses on imagination. The article will flesh out central historical and systematic aspects of the concept of imagination, but instead of submitting them to a history of ideas it will turn to a comparative study of the first monograph on imagination by the Renaissance philosopher Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola from 1501 and Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams from 1900 to investigate their respective understandings of imagination and inner images in the light of the technology of imagery. (shrink)

In rubber hand illusions and full body illusions, touch sensations are projected to non-body objects such as rubber hands, dolls or virtual bodies. The robustness, limits and further perceptual consequences of such illusions are not yet fully explored or understood. A number of experiments are reported that test the limits of a variant of the rubber hand illusion. Methodology/Principal Findings -/- A variant of the rubber hand illusion is explored, in which the real and foreign hands are aligned in (...) personal space. The presence of the illusion is ascertained with participants' scores and temperature changes of the real arm. This generates a basic illusion of touch projected to a foreign arm. Participants are presented with further, unusual visuotactile stimuli subsequent to onset of the basic illusion. Such further visuotactile stimulation is found to generate very unusual experiences of supernatural touch and touch on a non-hand object. The finding of touch on a non-hand object conflicts with prior findings, and to resolve this conflict a further hypothesis is successfully tested: that without prior onset of the basic illusion this unusual experience does not occur. Conclusions/Significance -/- A rubber hand illusion is found that can arise when the real and the foreign arm are aligned in personal space. This illusion persists through periods of no tactile stimulation and is strong enough to allow very unusual experiences of touch felt on a cardboard box and experiences of touch produced at a distance, as if by supernatural causation. These findings suggest that one's visual body image is explained away during experience of the illusion and they may be of further importance to understanding the role of experience in delusion formation. The findings of touch on non-hand objects may help reconcile conflicting results in this area of research. In addition, new evidence is provided that relates to the recently discovered psychologically induced temperature changes that occur during the illusion. (shrink)

Marshall McLuhan understood television as a tactile medium. This understanding implied what Bruno Latour might call a ‘symmetrical’ conception of tactility. According to McLuhan, not only human actors are endowed with the sense of touch. In addition, TV, digital computers and other ‘electric media’ use light beams and similar scanning techniques for ceaselessly ‘caressing the contours’ of their surroundings. This notion of tactility was crucially shaped by the holistic aesthetics of the early Bauhaus. To get at the specific features (...) of the TV image, McLuhan relied on the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and Sigfried Giedion, in particular their use of photography for capturing and highlighting the ‘texture’ of surfaces. However, he hardly reflected the social and political factors that, in the age of electric media, contribute to the ‘symmetricization’ of touch. (shrink)

How do we perceive reality? What role does the body play in the act of perception? Making the Body Heard takes up a neglected aspect of perceiving our surroundings, inner and outer. It shows how perceptual habit has encrusted a receptivity to impressions. It argues that we must relinquish a hold on visual metaphor in favor of the auditory and tactile. Through the development of a new organ of perception, we are able to come into contact with novelty and (...) existence. The study of perception includes an investigation of perceptual dimension and voice. (shrink)