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The sense of one’s own body is one of the oldest and most controversial topics in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. One reason for the continued interest in this area is the conflict between the conventional belief that ‘my body is mine’, and the considerable evidence that the construction of perceptual self- awareness depends on several preceding cognitive processes. Recent experimental manipulations of embodiment in healthy volunteers have allowed for important advances in knowledge. Studies in which participants receive ambiguous multisensory information about the appearance and location of their own body have shown dramatic manipulations of embodiment over external objects, other people’s bodies and even virtual avatars. These evidence suggest that bodily experience has psychophysically and psychometrically measurable internal components. Further, the sense of one’s own body is highly plastic, with representations of body structure and location particularly sensitive to multisensory influences.
I will review the crucial experimental paradigms used to investigate bodily self- awareness in humans. In particular, I will focus on the role of multisensory stimulation (visuo-tactile, visuo-vestibular and vestibular-tactile) in influencing our bodily experience.
Elisa Raffaella Ferrè is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London (UK). She obtained the PhD in Psychology from the University of Pavia (Italy) in 2012. In her PhD, Elisa was interested in the combination of information across different sensory modalities, focusing on the multisensory interactions between vestibular inputs from the ear’s balance organs and somatosensory inputs. Since 2012, Elisa is involved in the VERE project (Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-Embodiment) Project founded under the European Seventh Framework Program. In the framework of VERE, her research is coordinated by Prof. Patrick Haggard (UCL) and it is concerning the multisensory brain mechanisms of embodiment. She is also collaborating with other VERE partners, like Prof. Olaf Blanke (EPFL, Switzerland).