Abstract
Self-consciousness is the remarkable human experience of being a subject: the “I”. Self-consciousness is typically bound to a body, and particularly to the spatial dimensions of the body, as well as to its location and displacement in the gravitational field. Because the vestibular system encodes head position and movement in three-dimensional space, vestibular cortical processing likely contributes to spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness. We review here recent data showing vestibular effects on first-person perspective (the feeling from where “I” experience the world) and self-location (the feeling where “I” am located in space). We compare these findings to data showing vestibular effects on mental spatial transformation, self-motion perception, and body representation showing vestibular contributions to various spatial representations of the body with respect to the external world. Finally, we discuss the role for four posterior brain regions that process vestibular and other multisensory signals to encode spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness: temporoparietal junction, parietoinsular vestibular cortex, ventral intraparietal region, and medial superior temporal region. We propose that vestibular processing in these cortical regions is critical in linking multisensory signals from the body (personal and peripersonal space) with external (extrapersonal) space. Therefore, the vestibular system plays a critical role for neural representations of spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness.
Highlights
Humans’ experience as subject (“I”, the self) is typically bound to the spatial dimensions of the physical body
We propose that self-location and first-person perspective are encoded by a posterior cortical network consisting of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), i.e., a region that has been causally linked to bodily self-consciousness, and three vestibular cortex regions, i.e., the parietoinsular vestibular cortex (PIVC), the medial superior temporal region (MST), and the ventral intraparietal region (VIP), which together perform the necessary computation subserving a multisensory spatial reference for bodily self-consciousness
In the third part of this review we summarize the functional characteristics of three important posterior vestibular cortex regions, i.e., PIVC, MST, and VIP, and a region causally involved in bodily self-consciousness, i.e., TPJ, which together may encode selflocation and first-person perspective
Summary
Reviewed by: Francesca Ferri, University of Ottawa, Canada Hong Yu Wong, University of Tübingen, Germany. Because the vestibular system encodes head position and movement in three-dimensional space, vestibular cortical processing likely contributes to spatial aspects of bodily selfconsciousness. We review here recent data showing vestibular effects on first-person perspective (the feeling from where “I” experience the world) and self-location (the feeling where “I” am located in space). We compare these findings to data showing vestibular effects on mental spatial transformation, self-motion perception, and body representation showing vestibular contributions to various spatial representations of the body with respect to the external world.
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