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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on April 27, 2005
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi095
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Article

My Body or Yours? The Effect of Visual Perspective on Cortical Body Representations

Rebecca Saxe 1*, Nasheed Jamal 2, and Lindsey Powell 3

1 Psychology Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
2 Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
3 Psychology Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Rebecca Saxe, E-mail: saxe{at}mit.edu


  Abstract

A human body part, such as a foot, may be observed from an egocentric perspective (consistent with looking at one's own body, e.g. top of the foot, toes pointing up) or from an allocentric perspective (only consistent with looking at someone else, e.g. top of the foot, toes pointing downwards). We found that the right extrastriate body area (EBA) response to images of body parts was enhanced for body parts presented from an allocentric perspective. Other areas of extrastriate cortex which responded robustly to images of bodies, including the right lateral occipital complex, right MT and left EBA, nevertheless did not distinguish between the two perspectives. A region of primary somatosensory cortex showed the reverse selectivity: the blood oxygen level-dependent response to body parts presented from an allocentric perspective was suppressed. These results help to illuminate the integration of visual and tactile information by which the brain identifies seen body parts as belonging to the self or to another person.

Keywords: body representation; EBA; lateral occipital complex; MT; object recognition.
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