Affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Abstract: How does the brain determine whether sensory signals belong to the self or to the external world? A central component of this problem is body ownership, the fundamental perceptual experience that one’s body and bodily sensations belong to oneself. Body ownership relies on integrating multisensory bodily signals, yet only signals inferred to arise from a common source should be bound together. Temporal proximity is a key cue for this inference and is captured by the temporal binding window (TBW), the interval within which multisensory signals are likely to be integrated. In this talk, I propose that cortical oscillations in the posterior parietal cortex shape the TBW for body ownership. First, I will present evidence from psychophysics, EEG, non-invasive brain stimulation, and computational modelling showing that alpha oscillations govern the temporal integration of visuotactile bodily signals. Second, I will show that temporal integration during self-touch in the absence of vision is instead governed by beta-band frequency. Critically, this beta-based mechanism does not extend to visuotactile integration when visual body-related information is available. Together, these findings provide the first evidence for a double dissociation in the oscillatory mechanisms underlying bodily perception, demonstrating that distinct frequency bands govern temporal binding depending on the sensory modality through which the body is experienced.

Webex-Link: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=mbbec7f0be28f44c78837a524463a5c5b