Elsevier

Neuropsychologia

Volume 48, Issue 3, February 2010, Pages 703-712
Neuropsychologia

My body in the brain: A neurocognitive model of body-ownership

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2009.09.034Get rights and content

Abstract

Empirical research on the bodily self has only recently started to investigate how the link between a body and the experience of this body as mine is developed, maintained or disturbed. The Rubber Hand Illusion has been used as a model instance of the normal sense of embodiment to investigate the processes that underpin the experience of body-ownership. This review puts forward a neurocognitive model according to which body-ownership arises as an interaction between current multisensory input and internal models of the body. First, a pre-existing stored model of the body distinguishes between objects that may or may not be part of one's body. Second, on-line anatomical and postural representations of the body modulate the integration of multisensory information that leads to the recalibration of visual and tactile coordinate systems. Third, the resulting referral of tactile sensation will give rise to the subjective experience of body-ownership. These processes involve a neural network comprised of the right temporoparietal junction which tests the incorporeability of the external object, the secondary somatosensory cortex which maintains an on-line representation of the body, the posterior parietal and ventral premotor cortices which code for the recalibration of the hand-centred coordinate systems, and the right posterior insula which underpins the subjective experience of body-ownership. The experience of body-ownership may represent a critical component of self-specificity as evidenced by the different ways in which multisensory integration in interaction with internal models of the body can actually manipulate important physical and psychological aspects of the self.

Section snippets

Experimenting with body-ownership

At the inaugural lecture of the Centre for Subjectivity Research (Copenhagen, Denmark), Waldenfels referred to the riddle of “how to justify the fact that a certain physical body is called my own body (corpus meum) and how to find out whether there are other bodies that are animated by other minds” (Waldenfels, 2004, p. 235). In essence, the riddle mentioned by Waldenfels refers to the foundations of the experience of one's own body: “What grounds my experience of my body as my own? The body

What is the experience of body-ownership like?

A large sample study (Longo et al., 2008) investigated the subjective experience during the RHI by asking participants to complete a 27-item questionnaire after each of the synchronous and asynchronous blocks of visuo-tactile stimulation. A Principal Component Analysis (PCA) revealed that the subjective experience of ownership of the rubber hand consists of distinct dissociable components present in both synchronous and asynchronous conditions (Longo et al., 2008): ownership (e.g. rubber hand

The bottom-up account of body-ownership: the role of intermodal matching

Why and how is the rubber hand experienced as part of one's body? In brief, the RHI reflects the malleability of the representation of the body caused by multisensory processing. Multisensory processing aims at the integration of sensory signals and the resolution of potential conflicts to generate a coherent representation of the world and the body. The RHI reflects a three-way weighted interaction between vision, touch, and proprioception: vision of tactile stimulation on the rubber hand

On corporal and non-corporeal objects

If body-ownership was driven by synchronous multisensory stimulation as a sufficient condition, then we would expect to induce a sense of body-ownership over objects that do not resemble body-parts. Accumulating evidence suggests that the RHI is not induced when the rubber hand is replaced by a neutral non-corporeal object such a wooden stick (i.e. coding of visual form representations of body-parts, Haans et al., 2008, Tsakiris et al., 2008, Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005, see also Holmes,

Body-ownership as an interaction between current multisensory input and internal models of the body: a neurocognitive model of body-ownership

Makin, Holmes, and Ehrsson (2008) put forward a parsimonious account of the RHI based on processes of multisensory integration in peri-hand space (Maravita, Spence, & Driver, 2003), without the need of top-down modulation by body-representations. On their account, the RHI occurs when the following two conditions are met: first, the rubber hand should be situated in an anatomically plausible position, and second, the synchronous visual and tactile events should be both located near to the

Testing for fit with the body-model: the contribution of rTPJ

How does the brain decide on the compatibility and eventual incorporeability of an external object? The behavioural (Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005) and electrophysiological (Press et al., 2008) data suggest that the process of filtering what may or may not become part of one's body is not the same as the process of multisensory integration that drives the RHI. Tsakiris et al. (2008) suggested that current sensory stimuli are processed and finally tested-for-fit against an abstract body-model that

Beyond my hand: my body and myself

This paper focused on the necessary conditions for the experience of a body-part as belonging to my body as studied with the RHI. Blanke and Metzinger (2009) rightly comment on the need to investigate a more “global” sense of body-ownership for the whole body. Three recent studies employed visuo-tactile synchrony to investigate the extent to which phenomena similar to the RHI can be induced for whole bodies. Ehrsson (2007) used synchronous or asynchronous visuo-tactile stimulation while

Conclusion

One of the key questions in the neurocognitive study of self is that of specificity (Gillihan and Farah, 2005, Legrand and Ruby, 2009). Gillihan and Farah (2005) point to the fact that there is not a self-specific neural system or a single sense of self. Legrand and Ruby (2009) suggest that “self-specificity characterizes the subjective perspective, which is not intrinsically self-evaluative but rather relates any represented object to the representing subject”, by means of multisensory

Acknowledgment

The author acknowledges the ESRC First Grant RES-061-25-0233 and the contribution of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES Programme CNCC, supported by funds from the EC Sixth Framework Programme under Contract no. ERAS-CT-2003-980409.

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