Tactile Processing and the Multisensory Construction of the Self

Introduction

Among the various functions of touch, one of the most intriguing is its role in the development of the sense of self. In particular, touch has been shown to support interoception and, consequently, bodily awareness as a unified entity. This occurs through an afferent pathway that conveys tactile signals from the skin to the insular cortex, where moment-by-moment mapping of bodily signals takes place (Puhr, Waterink, and Van Hooren 2025). These mechanisms, on the one hand, enhance self-awareness and bodily awareness, and on the other, support the recognition of oneself as an entity.
 

Findings

The first and most important line of research has focused on studying bodily self-consciousness by examining body ownership at the level of the hand - for example, through the well-known “Rubber Hand Illusion” (Botvinick and Cohen 1998). The success of this illusion is thought to depend on the disruption of congruence between multimodal sensory signals related to the hand and on multisensory integration processes in the brain. Aspell et al. (2009) empirically extended this approach to the full body in order to investigate to what extent visuo-tactile stimuli can modulate bodily self-perception. In their paradigm, participants wore a head-mounted display showing their own body from behind, viewed from a distance of approximately two meters. Tactile stimuli (touches/vibrations) were applied to their back, while LED lights appeared on the virtual body either in synchrony or asynchrony with the tactile input. The authors found that synchronous stimulation increased the tendency to perceive one’s body as being closer to the observed virtual body.

Conclusion

This study is particularly interesting because it shows how the brain can “remap” tactile stimuli, modulating not only perceived spatial position but also tactile localization and, more broadly, the sense of body ownership. In this way, bodily awareness, tactile processing, and multisensory integration are tightly interconnected.

References

Aspell, Jane E., Bigna Lenggenhager, and Olaf Blanke. 2009. ‘Keeping in Touch with One’s Self: Multisensory Mechanisms of Self-Consciousness’ edited by M. A. Williams. PLoS ONE 4(8):e6488. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006488.
Botvinick, Matthew, and Jonathan Cohen. 1998. ‘Rubber Hands “Feel” Touch That Eyes See’. Nature 391(6669):756–756. doi:10.1038/35784.
Puhr, Ariane, Wim Waterink, and Susan Van Hooren. 2025. ‘The Effect of Touch on Affect, Stress, Sense of Connectedness and Sense of Self: An Experimental Study on Contact Improvisation Dance’. The Arts in Psychotherapy 93:102272. doi:10.1016/j.aip.2025.102272.