Self vs others: perceptual and neural mechanisms of self-touch

Our brain is constantly bombarded with touches that we generate ourselves, from scratching our heads to rubbing our eyes.

Yet, our brain effortlessly distinguishes such self-touches from similar touches applied to our body by other people or objects.

Computational theories of motor control suggest that the brain predicts the self-touches on the basis of our movements, and uses these predictions to attenuate the self-generated somatosensory input.

However, the details of this process remain poorly understood, due to i) little to no insight into the temporal profile of predictions, and ii) studies often conflating feedback and prediction in one and the same event.

Building on recent behavioral and neuroimaging findings from our lab, this project will use cutting-edge magnetoencephalography to delineate somatosensory processing during movement, rather than after receiving the self-touch (WP1), and experimentally omit the somatosensory feedback to isolate the contributions of predictive signals (WP2).

Finally, we will combine state-of-the-art structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging data with perceptual psychophysics in a large sample to pinpoint the brain areas that implement these self-touch predictions (WP3).

Taken together, this project will answer fundamental questions about self-touch, with important clinical relevance for disorders in which the distinction of self-touch from external touch is disturbed, such as schizophrenia.