Title: Bodily self-consciousness in humans and macaque monkeys

Speaker: Prof. Liping Wang，Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Time: 10:00-12:00, October 19, 2018

Location: Room 1113, Wang Kezhen Building

Abstract:

Modern psychology has long focused on the body as the basis of the self. As we interact with the world, we need constant information about where the body is. One powerful experimental tool to investigate the body schema is to induce illusions where we perceive artificial body parts as belonging to ourselves. To create an animal model and investigate neural mechanisms of body awareness, we used a virtual reality system and a reaching task, and combined with the hierarchical Bayesian Causal Inference model to establish an objective and quantitative proxy for bodily self-awareness in macaque monkeys. The results showed that, similarly to humans, monkeys integrated or segregated the external visual-proprioceptive information depending on the cue disparities, and updated their arm locations with the prior knowledge of body representation. Crucially, neurons in macaque premotor cortex represented the inferred hidden structure behind multiple sensory cues and updated the inference with new prior, illustrating the dynamic neural process of bodily self-awareness in macaques.

Host PI: Dr. Huan Luo