Just a heartbeat away from one's body: interoceptive sensitivity predicts malleability of body-representations

Locate full-text(opens in a new window)|Order document(opens in a new window)|View at Publisher(opens in a new window)| CSV export | Download | Save to list | More... Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Volume 278, Issue 1717, 22 August 2011, Pages 2470-2476 Just a heartbeat away from one's body:Interoceptive sensitivity predicts malleability of body-representations (Article) Tsakiris, M.a , Tajadura-Jiménez, A.a, Costantini, M.bc a Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, United Kingdom b Laboratory of Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neuroscience and Imaging, University G. d'Annunzio, Chieti, Italy c Institute for Advanced Biomedical Technologies-ITAB, Foundation University G. d'Annunzio, Chieti, Italy View additional affiliations View references (26) Abstract Body-awareness relies on the representation of both interoceptive and exteroceptive percepts coming from one's body. However, the exact relationship and possible interaction of interoceptive and exteroceptive systems for body-awareness remain unknown. We sought to understand for the first time, to our knowledge, the interaction between interoceptive and exteroceptive awareness of the body. First, we measured interoceptive awareness with an established heartbeat monitoring task. We, then, used a multi-sensory-induced manipulation of body-ownership (e.g. Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI)) and we quantified the extent to which participants experienced ownership over a foreign body-part using behavioural, physiological and introspective measures. The results suggest that interoceptive sensitivity predicts the malleability of body representations, that is, people with low interoceptive sensitivity experienced a stronger illusion of ownership in the RHI. Importantly, this effect was not simply owing to a poor proprioceptive representation or differences in autonomic states of one's body prior to the multi-sensory stimulation, suggesting that interoceptive awareness modulates the online integration of multi-sensory body-percepts