The vestibular system: a spatial reference for bodily self-consciousness.
- Pfeiffer C Center for Neuroprosthetics, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland ; Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland.
- Serino A Center for Neuroprosthetics, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland ; Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland ; Department of Psychology, Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna Bologna, Italy.
- Blanke O Center for Neuroprosthetics, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland ; Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Brain Mind Institute, School of Life Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland ; Department of Neurology, University Hospital Geneva Geneva, Switzerland.
- 2014-05-27
Published in:
- Frontiers in integrative neuroscience. - 2014
bodily self-consciousness
body representation
first-person perspective
mental spatial transformation
multisensory integration
self-location
self-motion
vestibular cortex
English
Self-consciousness is the remarkable human experience of being a subject: the "I". Self-consciousness is typically bound to a body, and particularly to the spatial dimensions of the body, as well as to its location and displacement in the gravitational field. Because the vestibular system encodes head position and movement in three-dimensional space, vestibular cortical processing likely contributes to spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness. We review here recent data showing vestibular effects on first-person perspective (the feeling from where "I" experience the world) and self-location (the feeling where "I" am located in space). We compare these findings to data showing vestibular effects on mental spatial transformation, self-motion perception, and body representation showing vestibular contributions to various spatial representations of the body with respect to the external world. Finally, we discuss the role for four posterior brain regions that process vestibular and other multisensory signals to encode spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness: temporoparietal junction, parietoinsular vestibular cortex, ventral intraparietal region, and medial superior temporal region. We propose that vestibular processing in these cortical regions is critical in linking multisensory signals from the body (personal and peripersonal space) with external (extrapersonal) space. Therefore, the vestibular system plays a critical role for neural representations of spatial aspects of bodily self-consciousness.
- Language
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- English
- Open access status
- gold
- Identifiers
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- DOI 10.3389/fnint.2014.00031
- PMID 24860446
- Persistent URL
- https://sonar.ch/global/documents/213990
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