Multisensory and Sensorimotor Integration in the Embodied Self: Relationship between Self-Body Recognition and the Mirror Neuron System

Abstract

The embodied self is rooted in the self-body in the “here and now”. The senses of self-ownership and self-agency have been proposed as the basis of the sense of embodied self, and many experimental studies have been conducted on this subject. This review summarizes the experimental research on the embodied self that has been conducted over the past 20 years, mainly from the perspective of multisensory integration and sensorimotor integration regarding the self-body. Furthermore, the phenomenon of back projection, in which changes in an external object (e.g., a rubber hand) with which one has a sense of ownership have an inverse influence on the sensation and movement of one’s own body, is discussed. This postulates that the self-body illusion is not merely an illusion caused by multisensory and/or sensorimotor integration, but is the incorporation of an external object into the self-body representation in the brain. As an extension of this fact, we will also review research on the mirror neuron system, which is considered to be the neural basis of recognition of others, and discuss how the neural basis of self-body recognition and the mirror neuron system can be regarded as essentially the same.

Keywords

• sense of ownership
• sense of agency
• rubber hand illusion
• robot hand illusion
• full body illusion
• mirror neuron system