Abstract
Self-location refers to the experience of occupying a given position in the environment. Recent research has addressed the sense of self-location as one of the key components of self-consciousness, together with the experience of owning the physical body (ownership) (Blanke and Metzinger, Trends Cogn Sci 13:7–13 in 2009. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.10.003). Experimentally controlled full-body illusions proved to be valuable research tools to study these components and their interaction, and to explore their underlying neural underpinning. The focus of this manuscript is to provide a close look into the nuances of different illusory experiences affecting the sense of self-location and to examine their relation to the concurrent experienced sense of body ownership. On the basis of previous reviewed studies, it is proposed that the sense of self-location may be regarded as the blending of two paralllel representations: the abstract allocentric coding of the position occupied in the environment, mainly associated with visual-perspective, and the egocentric mapping of somatosensory sensations into the external space, mainly associated with peripersonal space. Open questions to be addressed by future research are further addressed.
Notes
The term visual-perspective is here used instead of first-person-perspective, in order to avoid confusion with the use of the latter expression, often adopted in body ownership illusion studies, for indicating a first-person visual perspective over the fake body.
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Acknowledgments
A.M. whish to acknowledge the support of the ERC project TRAVERSE (#227985) awarded to Prof. Mel Slater, under which the bases for some of the ideas discussed in the manuscript have been conceived.
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Maselli, A. Allocentric and egocentric manipulations of the sense of self-location in full-body illusions and their relation with the sense of body ownership. Cogn Process 16 (Suppl 1), 309–312 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0667-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0667-z