Perceiving Your Own Body
Bruno and · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018
The perception of our own body is a defining characteristic of our sense of self and a prerequisite for interacting with the environment and guiding movements. In the traditional view, the body is perceived mostly through somatosensation. However, experimental results are increasingly demonstrating that visual and vestibular signals also play an important role in body perception, that somatosensation in body perception is not limited to touch as traditionally conceived but may also include signals from the interior of the body (interoception), and, perhaps most surprisingly, that how we perceive and represent our body can be rapidly altered by novel combinations of multisensory stimuli. These findings have important implications for our understanding of neurological impairments of body representation and for their rehabilitation.