Abstract
Some people report localised pain on their body when seeing other people in pain (sensory-localised vicarious pain responders). In this study, we assess whether this is related to atypical computations of body ownership which, in paradigms such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI), can be conceptualised as a Bayesian inference as to whether multiple sources of sensory information (visual, somatosensory) belong together on a single body (one’s own) or are distributed across several bodies (vision = other, somatosensory = self). According to this model, computations of body ownership depend on the degree (and precision) of sensory evidence, rather than synchrony per se. Sensory-localised vicarious pain responders exhibit the RHI following synchronous stroking and—unusually—also after asynchronous stroking. Importantly, this occurs only in asynchronous conditions in which the stroking is predictable (alternating) rather than unpredictable (random). There was no evidence that their bottom-up proprioceptive signals are less precise, suggesting individual differences in the top-down weighting of sensory evidence. Finally, the enfacement illusion (EI) was also employed as a conceptually related bodily illusion paradigm that involves a completely different response judgement (based on vision rather than proprioception). Sensory-localised responders show a comparable pattern on this task after synchronous and asynchronous stroking. This is consistent with the idea that they have top-down (prior) differences in the way body ownership is inferred that transcends the exact judgement being made (visual or proprioceptive).
Highlights
The sense of self primarily arises from the feeling of one’s body (Costantini, 2014; Tsakiris, 2017)
Even within the general population, there are likely to be substantial differences in the phenomenological experience of the bodily self that are underpinned by individual differences in the fidelity of relevant bodily signals and/or differences in the way that these signals are evaluated
One relevant group are people who report feeling the pain of others
Summary
The sense of self primarily arises from the feeling of one’s body (Costantini, 2014; Tsakiris, 2017). One relevant group are people who report feeling the pain of others (termed vicarious pain responders; Grice-Jackson et al., 2017; Osborn & Derbyshire, 2010) For these people, observations of pain elicit a pain-like phenomenology on their own body (and often a mirroring of other kinds of sensations and feelings; Fitzgibbon et al, 2010). Observed bodily experiences on other people are jointly shared between self and other, and this can arguably reflect a misattribution of body ownership (Ward & Banissy, 2015). In this view, vicarious pain can act as a marker of
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