In the real world, our bodies influence how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. Our body can also affect estimations of object sizes and distances. But how does our body affect our haptic experience? Here, we examined the modulation of a visuo-haptic illusion of touch on a virtual stick in virtual reality, when participants were embodied in an avatar and when they were not. During...
Conceptual self-awareness is a mental state in which the content of one's consciousness refers to a particular aspect of semantic knowledge about oneself. This form of consciousness plays a crucial role in shaping human behavior; however, little is known about its neural basis. Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a visual masked priming paradigm to dissociate the...
A primary aspect of the self is the sense of agency – the sense that one is causing an action. In the spirit of recent reductionistic approaches to other complex, multifaceted phenomena (e.g., working memory; cf. Johnson &Johnson, 2009), we attempt to unravel the sense of agency by investigating its most basic components, without invoking high-level conceptual or 'central executive' processes....