Abstract
During childhood, the body undergoes rapid changes suggesting the need to constantly update body representation based on the integration of multisensory signals. Sensory experiences in critical periods of early development may have a significant impact on the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning the development of the sense of one’s own body. Specifically, preterm children are at risk for sensory processing difficulties, which may lead to specific vulnerability in binding together sensory information in order to modulate the representation of the bodily self. The present study aims to investigate the malleability of body ownership in preterm (N = 21) and full-term (N = 19) school-age children, as reflected by sensitivity to the Rubber Hand Illusion. The results revealed that multisensory processes underlying the ability to identify a rubber hand as being part of one’s own body are already established in childhood, as indicated by a higher subjective feeling of embodiment over the rubber hand during synchronous visual-tactile stimulation. Notably, the effect of visual-tactile synchrony was related to the suppression of the alpha band oscillations over frontal, central, and parietal scalp regions, possibly indicating a greater activation of somatosensory and associative areas underpinning the illusory body ownership. Moreover, an interaction effect between visual-tactile condition and group emerged, suggesting that preterm children showed a greater suppression of alpha oscillatory activity during the illusion. This result together with lower scores of subjective embodiment over the rubber hand reported by preterm children indicate that preterm birth may affect the development of the flexible representation of the body. These findings provide an essential contribution to better understand the processes of identification and differentiation of the bodily self from the external environment, in both full-term and preterm children, paving the way for a multisensory and embodied approach to the investigation of social and cognitive development.
Highlights
The sense of body ownership, which is the feeling that our body belongs to ourselves, represents a central component of the developing sense of bodily self-awareness and the process of differentiation of the self from the others (Tsakiris, 2016)
The main effects of Condition (B = 1.68, SE = 0.26, t = 6.40 p < 0.001) and Group (B = −1.34, SE = 0.51, t = −2.62, p = 0.013) emerged. These results indicate that children felt a stronger sense of ownership over the rubber hand when the touch was delivered synchronously on the participant’s real hand and the rubber hand
The condition contrast applied to the power of oscillatory activity revealed a significant cluster of 22 electrodes over the right frontal, central and parietal areas, where alpha power (8–12 Hz) was lower in the synchronous condition compared to the asynchronous condition (Figure 7A)
Summary
The sense of body ownership, which is the feeling that our body belongs to ourselves, represents a central component of the developing sense of bodily self-awareness and the process of differentiation of the self from the others (Tsakiris, 2016). Developmental studies have demonstrated that infants differentiate sensations originating from within and outside the body, by showing the ability to discriminate visualproprioceptive (Bahrick and Watson, 1985; Rochat and Morgan, 1995; Morgan and Rochat, 1997), visual-tactile (Zmyj et al, 2011; Filippetti et al, 2013, 2016; Della Longa et al, 2020) and visualinteroceptive contingencies (Maister et al, 2017) This suggests that implicit bodily self-awareness is based on multisensory integration of bodily signals and early detection of synchrony between vision and sensory feedback from the body
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