BODILY SELF-RECOGNITION AND SKIN TEMPERATURE: A PILOT STUDY OF A VISUAL MATCHING PARADIGM

Bodily self-awareness is a complex, multi-component concept, and its elaboration is fundamental to the construction of a coherent sense of self. Among various sub-mechanisms involved in the formation of bodily self-awareness, one of the most important is bodily self-recognition which is defined as the ability to recognise our body as our own and as separate from others’ bodies. In everyday life, each action directed by the individual’s intentions involves an implicit or explicit knowledge of the bodily self through a multisensory integrative elaboration. Indeed, the literature suggests that in clinical or experimental conditions where self-knowledge is altered or manipulated, we can observe changes in physiological states such as body temperature. Thus, a further understanding of the relationship between self-recognition and autonomic mechanisms is fundamental to achieve a deep understanding of bodily awareness. From this perspective, the present pilot study aimed to investigate the relationship between bodily self-recognition and skin temperature in healthy participants. This interaction was investigated through the administration of a modified version of a classical self-recognition experimental paradigm, involving separately implicit and explicit bodily self-recognition. These two tasks consisted of visual matching tasks with 64 different combinations of stimuli depicting participants' and other individuals’ body parts alongside unanimated objects belonging to these two groups. Before and after each task, a difference of hand skin temperature was measured. As expected according to the previous literature, an induction of the self-advantage effect was seen during the implicit task. In line with the previous result, there was a significant increase in the hand temperature during the implicit task, whereas a slight decrease in the hand temperature was seen for the explicit task. The different patterns seen in the hand temperature changes underpin a dissociation between implicit and explicit bodily self-recognition mechanisms, thus suggesting a different autonomic involvement that is activated during these body recognition processes. Keywords: Bodily self-awareness, bodily self-recognition, skin temperature, visual matching task