Conveners
The Body Across the Lifespan: How Body Representation Is Shaped from Infancy to Old Age
- Francesca Frisco (Milano-Bicocca University)
Perceiving the body as one’s own relies on the integration of multisensory information such as vision, touch, and proprioception. Although multisensory mechanisms underlying body representation have been widely investigated in adulthood, how these processes develop at birth and change with aging remains poorly understood. This symposium aims to provide a comprehensive, lifespan-oriented...
When we observe freely moving newborns, we may notice that, among their spontaneous movements, self-directed ones are the most frequent. Influential accounts have pioneeringly hypothesized that early self-exploratory movements may hold a significant evolutionary meaning, by fostering the emergence of a primitive bodily-self representation (Rochat et al., 2001). Indeed, self-directed movements...
The ability to distinguish one’s own body from the external world is a crucial milestone in early development. Hands may play a crucial role in this process: from the earliest spontaneous movements, as infants engage in visually guided actions, the integration of visual, proprioceptive, and motor information may strengthen their ability to discriminate their own hands from the environment. In...
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...
Introduction: The way we perceive our body and its dimensions depends on how our brain combines information from different senses (Blanke et al. 2015). As the human sensory system declines with age, affecting all sensory modalities (Cavazzana et al. 2018), we hypothesize that body perception may differ between older and younger adults.
Methods: We investigate this hypothesis by comparing the...
