Bodily self-awareness and object perception

Tactile perception, cortical representation and the bodily self

The sensory information we receive from our own bodies is unique, both from epistemological and neurological points of view. Philosophers have noted the immediate, private quality of bodily sensation. I can understand your visual percepts by looking in the same direction as you, but understanding your tactile sensation would require being in your skin! Descartes took an additional step, arguing...

The Intimate Connexion: Bodily Awareness and Bodily Agency

Bodily ownership and self-location: components of bodily self-consciousness.

Recent research on bodily self-consciousness has assumed that it consists of three distinct components: the experience of owning a body (body ownership); the experience of being a body with a given location within the environment (self-location); and the experience of taking a first-person, body-centered, perspective on that environment (perspective). Here we review recent neuroimaging studies ...

Turning body and self inside out: visualized heartbeats alter bodily self-consciousness and tactile perception.

Prominent theories highlight the importance of bodily perception for self-consciousness, but it is currently not known whether bodily perception is based on interoceptive or exteroceptive signals or on integrated signals from these anatomically distinct systems. In the research reported here, we combined both types of signals by surreptitiously providing participants with visual exteroceptive i...

Plasticity and Awareness of Bodily Distortion

Knowledge of the body is filtered by perceptual information, recalibrated through predominantly innate stored information, and neurally mediated by direct sensory motor information. Despite multiple sources, the immediate prediction, construction, and evaluation of one's body are distorted. The origins of such distortions are unclear. In this review, we consider three possible sources of awaren...