Mental imagery of self-location during spontaneous and active self-other interactions: an electrical neuroimaging study.

Substantial data from the cognitive neurosciences point to the importance of bodily processing for the development of a comprehensive theory of the self. A key aspect of the bodily self is self-location, the experience that the self is localized at a specific position in space within one's bodily borders (embodied self-location). Although the neural mechanisms of self-location have been studied by manipulating the spatial location of one's visual perspective during mental imagery, such experiments were conducted in constrained, explicit, and unecological contexts such as explicit instructions in a prone/seated position, although most human interactions occur spontaneously while standing/walking. Using a motor paradigm, we investigated the behavioral and neural mechanisms of spontaneous self-location and mental body transformations during active human interaction. Using own-body imagery using spontaneous and explicit changes in self-location in standing participants, we report that spontaneous interactions with an avatar are neurally indistinguishable from explicit own-body transformation with disembodied self-location but differ from explicit own-body transformation with embodied self-location at 400-600 ms after stimulus onset. We discuss these findings with respect to the neural mechanisms of perspective-taking and self-location in spontaneous human interaction.

Walking on a line: a motor paradigm using rotation and reflection symmetry to study mental body transformations.

Researchers have recently reintroduced the own-body in the center of the social interaction theory. From the discovery of the mirror neurons in the ventral premotor cortex of the monkey's brain, a human embodied model of interindividual relationship based on simulation processes has been advanced, according to which we tend to embody spontaneously the other individuals' behavior when interacting. Although the neurocognitive mechanisms of the embodiment process have started being described, the mechanisms of self-location during embodiment are still less known. Here, we designed a motor paradigm which allows investigating in ecologically more valid conditions whether we embody another person's intransitive action with an embodied or disembodied self-location. Accordingly, we propose a phenomenological model of self-other interaction showing how perspective-taking mechanisms may relate on mental body transformation and offering a promising way to investigate the different sorts of intersubjectivity.