Katerina gave this talk as part of the Special Lecture Series of the Division of Psychiatry, University of Edinburgh.

Bodily Egocentricity and Allocentricity: From Anosognosia to Anorexia

Abstract

According to the Embodied cognition approach several facets of self-awareness are causally related to the physical body and its properties. Primary sensorimotor signals are integrated and re-represented in various levels of the neurocognitive hierarchy to form a number of neurocognitively distinct bodily representations, including unconscious and conscious facets of the bodily self such as body agency, ownership and image. However, the precise mechanisms by which bodily signals are integrated and re-mapped in the brain to give rise to our consious percepts and feelings of ownening and controlling a body remain unknown.

In this talk, I will present a series of empirical studies on neuropsychiatric disorders of body awareness, including anosognosia for hemiplegia and somatoparaphrenia following right hemisphere stroke, functional motor disorders and anorexia nervosa. In such studies we have use a number of neuroimaging and experimental paradigms from cognitive neuroscience, during which simple psychophysical tricks are used to systematically manipulate sensorimotor signals, promote their integration, or generate conflicts and illusions, and hence study their role in body awareness. Our results highlight that these disorders can be best described as different aberrations of a core antagonism between bottom-up signals, and top-down prior beliefs, with particular emphasis on the role of interoception and its relation to perspective-taking and metacognition.