2024/12/31 by Renzo C. Lanfranco, Sucharit Katyal, August Hägerdal +3 · 1 voice
Medicine · Computer Science · Psychology · #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments #Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts #Action Observation and Synchronization
paper · pdf · doi:10.31234/osf.io/e6tdy
Conscious awareness refers to the subjective experience of perceiving, thinking, and feeling, along with the ability to report these experiences. These perceptions and thoughts are experienced as bound to an individual self. A fundamental aspect of this self-consciousness is the sense of bodily self—the experience of one's physical presence distinct from the external world, serving as the spatial reference point for conscious perceptions. A key component of the bodily self is the sense of body ownership, the experience of the body as one's own. Research shows that this sense involves integrating signals from different sensory modalities, including vision, touch, and proprioception, into a coherent multisensory percept. However, the relationship between body ownership and conscious awareness remains unclear. To investigate this, we developed a psychophysical paradigm to objectively quantify multisensory integration, conscious awareness, and their relationships within a bodily illusion that manipulates body ownership perception. Using signal-detection analysis, metacognitive computational modelling, and drift‒diffusion modelling, we found that conscious awareness reports closely matched the objective discrimination of body ownership. This relationship remained consistent across different levels of multisensory integration and evidence accumulation. A visuotactile control experiment further revealed that this strong conscious access is specific to body ownership, and not general to multisensory integration. These findings suggest that conscious awareness has continuous and prioritised access to body ownership, implying that the self-related form of multisensory integration supporting body ownership is largely implemented at the level of conscious processing. This provides theoretical insight into how conscious awareness and the bodily self are intertwined, with wide-reaching implications for research on both consciousness and body representation.