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Ferri, F., Chiarelli, A. M., Merla, A., Gallese, V., & Costantini, M. (2013). The body beyond the body: expectation of a sensory event is enough to induce ownership over a fake hand. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 280(1765), 20131140. http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.1140
Neuroscientists and philosophers, among others, have long questioned the contribution of bodily experience to the constitution of self-consciousness. Contemporary research answers this question by focusing on the notions of sense of agency and/or sense of ownership. Recently, however, it has been proposed that the bodily self might also be rooted in bodily motor experience, that is, in the experience of oneself as instantiating a bodily structure that enables a specific range of actions. In the current fMRI study, we tested this hypothesis by making participants undergo a hand laterality judgment task, which is known to be solved by simulating a motor rotation of one's own hand. The stimulus to be judged was either the participant's own hand or the hand of a stranger. We used this task to investigate whether mental rotation of pictures depicting one's own hands leads to a different activation of the sensorimotor areas as compared with the mental rotation of pictures depicting another's hand. We revealed a neural network for the general representation of the bodily self encompassing the SMA and pre-SMA, the anterior insula, and the occipital cortex, bilaterally. Crucially, the representation of one's own dominant hand turned out to be primarily confined to the left premotor cortex. Our data seem to support the existence of a sense of bodily self encased within the sensorimotor system. We propose that such a sensorimotor representation of the bodily self might help us to differentiate our own body from that of others.
In everyday life, we move, see, and feel our body and have no doubt that it is our own. Any experience of our body provides us with a variety of information related to it, such as our visual, tactile, and, more generally, physiological state. Besides the distinction between exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive awareness, what is the basic experience of our body as a bodily self ? What enables us to implicitly distinguish our body from other human bodies (Ferri, Frassinetti, Costantini, & Gallese, 2011; Frassinetti, Ferri, Maini, Benassi, & Gallese, 2011; Frassinetti et al., 2009, 2010; Frassinetti, Maini, Romualdi, Galante, & Avanzi, 2008)? Recently, it has been proposed that the bodily self can be conceived as motor in nature (Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2010; Legrand, 2006), that is, based on the experience of our own body parts according to their motor potentialities, as they are represented in a motor bodily format (see Gallese & Sinigaglia, 2011). Accordingly, Smith (2007) explained the concept of bodily self as follows: “The bodily self is a physical agent. Knowledge of oneself as bodily is fundamentally knowledge of oneself as agentive; such knowledge is grounded in both experience of oneself as instantiating a bodily structure that affords a limited range of actions, and experience of oneself as a physical agent that tries to perform a limited range of actions over time” (p. 4)
Fake rubber hand illusion
Bodily self-consciousness has been studied extensively using the so-called rubber hand illusion. In this illusion the participant watches a fake rubber hand on a table being stroked in synchrony with his corresponding (left or right) hidden hand. After about 1 min this visuo-tactile manipulation leads in many participants to the illusory feeling that the rubber hand “feels like my own hand” (i.e., illusory hand ownership).
This does not happen when the stroking is applied asynchronously, suggesting that visuo-tactile integration is crucial for hand ownership (Botvinick and Cohen 1998). This phenomenological experience of illusory hand ownership is accompanied by a change or recalibration of where participants localize their real stroked hand (Botvinick and Cohen 1998; Ehrsson et al. 2004; Tsakiris and Haggard 2005).