Visual and Proprioceptive Contributions to the Perception of one's Body

The perception of one's body includes distinguishing one's body from other objects and creating an internal body representation. In this talk I will review evidence suggesting that localizing a tactile stimulus on the body surface involves a body representation that is at least partially coded in visual coordinates and that the view of one's body needs to be synchronous in time and aligned in space with non-visual information to be treated as one's own. The former claim comes from the effect of eye and head position on localizing a touch on the arm or torso. The latter claim comes from experiments in which the perspective from which the hand or head was viewed was altered using an electronic mirror. When the perspective was consistent with viewing one's own body (either directly or in a mirror) subjects were more sensitive at detecting temporal asynchronies between visual and non-visual cues to movement of that body part. These results will be discussed in terms of allocentric and egocentric coding of the body