Correlation and regression analyses revealed that meta-cognitive interoceptive awareness was
specifically and negatively related to the exteroceptively mediated malleability of body
experiences. These results indicate that the perception of the self being located within one’s
body relies on the interaction of exteroceptive input and higher-order interoceptive abilities.
However, interoception, defined as the processing of inner physiological signals, represents
another important source for an individual’s body representation. Interoception has been linked
to a variety of psychological functions, such as emotion processing (e.g., Craig, 2004), social
cognition (e.g., Ferri et al., 2013), or self-awareness (e.g., Ainley et al., 2012).
Remarkably, the perceptual processes underlying bodily self-location can be easily manipulated
by the application of unusual multimodal exteroceptive input (Ehrsson, 2007). In this kind of
experiment, the participant wears a head-mounted display transmitting a streaming video signal
recorded by a camera placed behind the subject.
or example, there is evidence that the higher-order dimension of interoceptive awareness is a
particular indicator of interoceptive abilities across organ-specific axes, such as cardiac and
respiratory modalities (Garfinkel et al., 2016a). Thus, it is likely that relating these different
measures of interoception to bodily self-location might reveal new insights into the underlying
mechanisms
Discussion
Bodily self-consciousness is composed of three key components, perceptually reflected by the
sensation of having a body that (a) belongs to one’s self (self-identification), (b) is the locus from
where an individual is experiencing the world (first-person perspective), and (c) is experienced
as occupying a specific location in space (self-location; Blanke, 2012). These dimensions of
bodily self-consciousness are tightly interlinked (Huang et al., 2017) and can be mediated by
exteroception and/or interoception (e.g., Aspell et al., 2012, 2013). The experience of one’s self
being located within one’s body, as assessed in the present study, represents the “normal”
perceptual consequence of these processes. Both exteroceptive (Ehrsson, 2007; Lenggenhager
et al., 2007) and interoceptive (Adler et al., 2014) processes have been identified as specifically
contributing to the co-location of the body and the self.
This indicates that better metacognitive interoceptive awareness is accompanied by a body
percept that is less prone to being malleable by exteroceptive input. In other words, such
participants’ perceptual systems rely more on higher-order interoceptive processes rather than
on exteroception, resulting in a more stable body representation. The results also remained
significant if we focused on the significant perspective × stimulation effect on out-of-body
experiences, suggesting that dislocation, rather than co-location, is particularly relying on
metacognitive interoceptive capabilities. These results are of importance for theoretical
conceptions about bodily self-consciousness, as well as for the understanding of
psychopathologies characterized by aberrant connections between the body and the self.
This study adds to the existing empirical evidence that links the malleability of bodily self-
consciousness to interoceptive abilities (e.g., Tsakiris et al., 2011; Adler et al., 2014). While the
integration of sensory information across exteroceptive and interoceptive domains has
previously been shown to modulate bodily self-consciousness (Suzuki et al., 2013),
Most importantly, our results indicate that higher-order, metacognitive interoceptive awareness,
rather than behavioral performance on interoceptive accuracy or interoceptive sensibility,
predicts the malleability of the bodily self-location. Interoceptive awareness, compared to the
other interoceptive dimensions, seems to be a particularly reliable indicator of one’s own bodily
states, since previous findings revealed that interoceptive awareness—in contrast to
interoceptive accuracy—represents a relatively stable trait across physiological modalities
(Garfinkel et al., 2016a). Thus, this particular interoceptive dimension might also play a role in
the stability (or malleability) of body representations: the more reliable the information is
from my body and the more I am aware of this reliability, the less dependent my perceptual
system is on exteroceptive information
. There is growing evidence that disturbed interoception may be important for dysfunctions in
several conditions of disordered mental health (Khalsa et al., 2018). For example, borderline
personality disorder patients, who frequently report dissociative body perceptions (Löffler et al.,
2020), have been characterized by both abnormal integration of multimodal sensory input
(Bekrater-Bodmann et al., 2016) and disturbed neural representation of interoceptive signals
(Müller et al., 2015). Accordingly, interoceptive abilities, particularly interoceptive awareness,
have been proposed to play an etiological role in the development of this disorder (Löffler et al.,
2018ook