Speaker
Description
How do age-related changes impact bodily-self perception? We tackled this issue by investigating the effect of age on multisensory integration processes underlying the sense of body ownership – the feeling that "my body is mine." Using the rubber hand illusion across three age groups (young, middle-aged, and older adults), we found that the explicit component of body ownership (the subjective and conscious experience of one's body belonging to the self) follows a U-shaped trajectory across the lifespan. Similar to young adults, older adults exhibited a stronger illusion, indicating greater flexibility in body representation compared to middle-aged participants. Conversely, middle-aged adults showed more resistance to the illusion, suggesting a more stable body representation than both younger and older adults. No age-related differences emerged in the implicit component of body ownership (e.g., proprioceptive drift). These findings are mainly interpreted in terms of different stages of development in perceptual and cognitive functions involved in the sense of body ownership.
| If you're submitting a symposium talk, what's the symposium title? | The Body Across the Lifespan: How Body Representation Is Shaped from Infancy to Old Age |
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| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | No |
