A fronto-insular-parietal network for the sense of body ownership

Abstract

Neuropsychological disturbances in the sense of limb ownership (DSO) provide a unique opportunity to study the neurocognitive basis of the sense of body ownership. Previous small sample studies focused on discrete cortical lesions and modular accounts, which cannot explain the modulations of DSO by multisensory, affective and cognitive manipulations. We tested the novel hypothesis that DSO would be associated not only with discrete cortical lesions, but also with disconnections of frontoparietal and fronto-insular white-matter tracts, supporting functional networks for multisensory integration and salience monitoring. To overcome the aforementioned methodological limitations, we drew on an advanced, probabilistic lesion-analysis and Bayesian statistics approach and tested this hypothesis in 49 right-hemisphere patients. Our results reveal that, as predicted, DSO is associated with lesions and disconnections of a fronto-insular-parietal network, suggesting that the sense of body ownership involves the convergence between bottom-up processes of multisensory integration and top-down control and monitoring of sensory salience.

Structural connectivity associated with the sense of body ownership: a diffusion tensor imaging and disconnection study in patients with bodily awareness disorder

“…To this aim, we took advantage of the advanced structural connectivity analyses on a large cohort of patients as it has already been successfully reported by a previous study investigating neural underpinnings of neuropsychological deficits at group level. 12–14 Here, we compared E+ and E− patients, by combining three different approaches based on the reconstruction of disconnection maps and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) probabilistic tractography.…”

Bodily Illusions and Motor Imagery in Fibromyalgia

“…In spite of this apparent stability, the sense of body is extremely plastic and fragile, as shown in several studies on neurological patients with body representation disorders as a consequence of brain damage ( Pacella et al, 2019 ; Fornia et al, 2020 ; Moro et al, 2021b ). Furthermore, experiments with healthy participants indicate that even in the absence of a brain lesion, information coming from the body may be delusive and induce corporeal illusions ( Botvinick and Cohen, 1998 ; Pavani et al, 2000 ; Maravita et al, 2003 ; Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005 ; Pavani and Zampini, 2007 ; Tsakiris et al, 2010 ; Tieri et al, 2015a , b ; Golaszewski et al, 2021 ).…”