Abstract
Own body perception, and differentiating and comparing one's body to another person's body, are common cognitive functions that have relevance for self‐identity and social interactions. In several psychiatric conditions, including anorexia nervosa, body dysmorphic disorder, gender dysphoria, and autism spectrum disorder, self and own body perception, as well as aspects of social communication are disturbed. Despite most of these conditions having skewed prevalence sex ratios, little is known about whether the neural basis of own body perception differs between the sexes. We addressed this question by investigating brain activation using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a Body Perception task in 15 male and 15 female healthy participants. Participants viewed their own body, bodies of same‐sex, or opposite‐sex other people, and rated the degree that they appeared like themselves. We found that men and women did not differ in the pattern of brain activation during own body perception compared to a scrambled control image. However, when viewing images of other bodies of same‐sex or opposite‐sex, men showed significantly stronger activations in attention‐related and reward‐related brain regions, whereas women engaged stronger activations in striatal, medial‐prefrontal, and insular cortices, when viewing the own body compared to other images of the opposite sex. It is possible that other body images, particularly of the opposite sex, may be of greater salience for men, whereas images of own bodies may be more salient for women. These observations provide tentative neurobiological correlates to why women may be more vulnerable than men to conditions involving own body perception.
Highlights
The neurobiology of identity and self-concept is currently a hot topic among neuroscientists, and emerging data suggest that it is mediated by specific cerebral networks
Despite the groups being of equivalent age, we reprocessed the analyses for all contrasts of the Body Perception Task, as presented below, using age as a covariate of no interest
The current study investigated whether cerebral processing of the perception of one's own body and of other bodies in the context of self differs between men and women
Summary
The neurobiology of identity and self-concept is currently a hot topic among neuroscientists, and emerging data suggest that it is mediated by specific cerebral networks. While certainly influenced by cultural and other environmental factors, gender identity is, foremost shaped by the perception of one's own body and its sex characteristics. Are there specific neural networks for processing recognition of the sex of the body? Self-other distinction, crucial for human social interaction, relies mainly on the visual perception of the own and another person's body (Longo, Azañón, & Haggard, 2010). This process can be viewed as a composition of three components: (1) those involving sensory perception of own body, (2) the specific perception of body ownership, and (3) the integration of own body into the concept of self. Within more extended networks, specialized in visual body perception include the fusiform body area (FBA) and extrastriate body area (EBA), which are specialized in human body and body parts perception
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