Imagined own-body transformations during passive self-motion

Abstract

Spatial perspective taking is a crucial social skill that underlies many of our everyday interactions. Previous studies have suggested that spatial perspective taking is an embodied process that involves the integration of both motor and proprioceptive information. Given the importance of vestibular signals for own-body perception, mental own-body imagery, and bodily self-consciousness, in the present study we hypothesized that vestibular stimulation due to passive own-body displacements should also modulate spatial perspective taking. Participants performed an own-body transformation task while being passively rotated in a clockwise or counter-clockwise direction on a human motion platform. A congruency effect was observed, reflected in faster reaction times if the implied mental body rotation direction matched the actual rotation direction of the chair. These findings indicate that vestibular stimulation modulates and facilitates mental perspective taking, thereby highlighting the importance of integrating multisensory bodily information for spatial perspective taking.

The vestibular system: a spatial reference for bodily self-consciousness

“…Passive whole-body yaw rotations (activating the horizontal semicircular canals) facilitated egocentric body-related mental imagery if actual rotations and shortest paths of mental rotation were side-congruent. While general bilateral vestibular loss in the study by Grabherr et al (2011), and GVS in the study by Lenggenhager et al (2008), involved altered vestibular signals from both otoliths and semicircular canals, the study by van Elk and Blanke (2014) showed that selective stimulation of the semicircular canal signals affected egocentric mental imagery.…”

“…Natural vestibular stimulation can be experimentally induced by head accelerations, e.g., by passive whole-body rotation or translation (e.g., Prsa et al, 2012; van Elk and Blanke, 2014) that are sensed by the semicircular canals or otolith organs respectively. Natural vestibular stimulation may be given under terrestrial conditions by constant gravitational forces due to the attraction exerted by the earth on mass.…”

“…While Grabherr et al (2011) and Lenggenhager et al (2008) studied the effects of vestibular damage and artificial stimulation on mental imagery, van Elk and Blanke (2014) used natural vestibular stimulation and found comparable results. Passive whole-body yaw rotations (activating the horizontal semicircular canals) facilitated egocentric body-related mental imagery if actual rotations and shortest paths of mental rotation were side-congruent.…”

Ways to investigate vestibular contributions to cognitive processes

“…The cognitive processes with a clear spatial component include mental space representation such as the mental number line (Hartmann et al, 2012; Ferre et al, 2013b) and mental body transformation or perspective-taking (Lenggenhager et al, 2008; Falconer and Mast, 2012; Van Elk and Blanke, 2014). Several studies have investigated whether vestibular sensations influence mental space and movement representations.…”

“…Originally conceived as a primary system embedded into reflex generation for spinal and ocular-motor control, there is now an exciting and rapidly growing line of research showing that the vestibular system—which is intrinsically highly convergent with other sensory and motor signals (Angelaki and Cullen, 2008)—interacts with various cognitive processes such as spatial navigation (Angelaki et al, 2009), space perception (Ferre et al, 2013a), body representation (Lopez et al, 2010; Ferre et al, 2013c), mental imagery (Lenggenhager et al, 2008; Falconer and Mast, 2012; Van Elk and Blanke, 2014), attention (e.g., Figliozzi et al, 2005), memory (e.g., Smith et al, 2010), risk perception (Mckay et al, 2013), and even social cognition (Lopez et al, 2013). …”