The contribution of tactile and thermal signals to the sense of body ownership

The feeling that the body belongs to oneself (i.e., sense of body ownership) is the result of sophisticated processes of multisensory integration, whereby exteroceptive, proprioceptive, and interoceptive signals are continuously combined. Illusions of body ownership, such as the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI), can provide some insight into the interplay between vision, proprioception, and touch. In this talk, I will present a series of studies investigating the contribution of skin-mediates signals, such as touch and temperature, to the perception of a body part as belonging to ourselves. Our results will also be discussed in the context of experimental data with clinical populations. Taken together, our data suggest that skin-mediated interoception signals may make a unique contribution to the sense of body ownership, and by implication to our embodied psychological ‘self’.