My words, my feelings, my actions: Exploring the link between linguistic self-representations, the bodily self and the subjective experience of body ownership and agency

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Cornelia Herbert
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 440171116

The minimal self refers to the self as an actor and owner of sensations, feelings and actions and hence to an embodied self whose sensory and motor experiences provide the basis for bodily self-awareness and for the sense of agency and body ownership. Crucially, perceiving, sensing and acting as a minimal but embodied self has been closely associated with sensorimotor and somatosensory information processing, i.e., processes operating primarily at a prereflective and prelinguistic level. However, this does not mean that in humans, processes associated with the bodily minimal self and processes associated with language and cognition would be unrelated. Behavioral and neuroscientific research in healthy adults accumulated empirical evidence against the disembodiment of human language and cognition. In line with this evidence, the present project proposal will investigate (1) how perceiving, feeling and acting as a bodily minimal self interact with the processing of linguistic representations of the self and (2) how the processing of linguistic self-representations addressing the self as an agent (“I”) and owner (“my”) of subjective experience influences feelings, judgements and illusions of agency and ownership during somatosensory tactile stimulation, during voluntary motor control and during the rubber hand and enfacement illusions. Pronouns will include personal and possessive first person pronouns referring to the self as subject and agent (“I”, “you” vs. “he”/”she”) or as object and owner (“my”, “yours” vs. (“his”/”her”) of experience. Pronouns will be presented visually and acoustically to explore effects between linguistic and bodily somatosensory and sensorimotor processing across modalities. Methodologically, EEG-ERP measures, peripheral-physiological (e.g., startle-reflex modulation, heart rate, finger-/hand temperature, skin conductance) as well as behavioral and self-report measures of agency and ownership will be used to investigate how and at which stages of information processing self-referential processing of linguistic cues interacts with bodily somatosensory and sensorimotor experience, with feelings and judgements of agency and body ownership and with the experience of body ownership illusions including hand and face. The primary focus is on healthy adults because in healthy adults a stable sense of self - both with regard to language and bodily experience - is already developed. Individuals from individualistic and collectivistic societies will be investigated to prove the dependence/independence from cultural and linguistic norms. Individual differences in body ownership illusion and in self-other overlap will be additionally controlled by baseline measurements. The project will close important explanatory gaps in the scientific understanding of the relationship between bodily processes, linguistic representations of the self and the subjective experience of agency and body ownership.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants