Mirror-touch synaesthesia: Difficulties inhibiting the other

Abstract

Individuals with mirror touch synaesthesia (MTS) experience touch on their own body when observing others being touched. A recent account proposes that such rare experiences could be linked to impairment in self-other representations. Here we tested participants with MTS on a battery of social cognition tests and found that compared to non-synaesthete controls, the MTS group showed impairment in imitation-inhibition but not in visual perspective taking or theory of mind. Although all of these socio-cognitive abilities rely on the control of self-other representations, they differ as to whether the self, or the other, should be preferentially represented. For imitation-inhibition, representations of the other should be inhibited and self-representations should be enhanced, whereas the opposite is true for visual perspective taking and theory of mind. These findings suggest that MTS is associated with a specific deficit in inhibiting representation of other individuals and shed light on the fractionability of processes underlying typical social cognition.