Interoceptive Awareness Is Negatively Related to the Exteroceptive Manipulation of Bodily Self-Location.

Robin Bekrater-Bodmann,Vivien Ainley,Ruben T Azevedo,Manos Tsakiris

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.562016

Abstract

The perception of being located within one’s body (i.e., bodily self-location) is an essential feature of everyday self-experience. However, by manipulating exteroceptive input, healthy participants can easily be induced to perceive themselves as being spatially dislocated from their physical bodies. It has previously been suggested that interoception, i.e., the processing of inner physiological signals, contributes to the stability of body representations; however, this relationship has not previously been tested for different dimensions of interoception and bodily self-location. In the present study, using an advanced automatized setup, we systematically manipulated participants’ perspective of their own body (first- vs third-person perspective) as well as the synchrony of visuotactile stimulation (synchronous vs asynchronous). The malleability of bodily self-location was assessed using a questionnaire targeting in-body and out-of-body experiences. Participants also performed a heartbeat discrimination task to assess their interoceptive accuracy (behavioral performance), interoceptive sensibility (confidence in their interoceptive abilities), and interoceptive awareness (meta-cognitive representation of interoceptive signals). Bodily self-location was significantly influenced by perspective, with third-person perspective being associated with stronger out-of-body experiences compared to first-person perspective. Furthermore, there was a significant perspective × stimulation interaction, with subsequent analyses showing that participants reported out-of-body experiences particularly under third-person perspective combined with synchronous visuotactile stimulation. Correlation and regression analyses revealed that meta-cognitive interoceptive awareness was specifically and negatively related to the exteroceptively mediated malleability of body experiences. These results indicate that the perception of the self being located within one’s body relies on the interaction of exteroceptive input and higher-order interoceptive abilities. This has implications for theoretical considerations about the bodily self in health as well as for the understanding of disturbed bodily self-processing in clinical contexts.

Highlights

The perception of being located within one’s body, i.e., bodily self-location, is an essential feature of bodily self-consciousness (Blanke and Metzinger, 2009), describing the perception of oneself as an embodied agent with a first-person perspective
In addition to the induction of out-of-body experiences by third-person perspective (3PP) that have been previously explored (Ehrsson, 2007), we introduced a novel condition in which participants were induced to perceive the scene from a first-person perspective (1PP), eliciting “normal” but still illusory in-body experiences that do not affect the location of the self in respect to the body
Since out-of-body experiences were affected by perspective and stimulation, the analyses described above were repeated for the effect between 3PPsync and 3PPasync conditions

Summary

Introduction

The perception of being located within one’s body, i.e., bodily self-location, is an essential feature of bodily self-consciousness (Blanke and Metzinger, 2009), describing the perception of oneself as an embodied agent with a first-person perspective. The processes that underlie bodily self-location are anything but trivial. A variety of sensory signals have to be processed simultaneously and integrated into a corresponding percept, resulting in the experience of the self being located within the borders of the body. These processes appear to be abnormal under certain clinical and non-clinical conditions. Mental pathologies such as dissociative disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, or borderline personality disorder are accompanied by strong dissociative experiences (Lyssenko et al, 2018), which can involve aberrant bodily self-location (e.g., Stiglmayr et al, 2003). 5% of the general population report having such experiences at least once in their lifetimes (Ohayon, 2000), indicating that this unusual mode of locating the self in respect to the body is somehow part of the common repertoire of human perception

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Conclusion