Body perception

The body is our primary interface with the world: it allows us to gather inputs from the outside, to build a representation of the world, to act and directly manipulate the environment. However, we do not perceive our body accurately. For example, in the absence of visual information, we systematically misestimate the position of our limbs and joints in space. How and why do these biases in body perception arise? Our research focuses on the role of sensorial and representational information (e.g., neural representation of the body structure, conceptual and spatial maps) in the emergence of these biases, and their impact on sensorimotor behavior. Our body is not only our interface with the outside world, but also a life-long presence of our conscious experience. How does the experience of having a body emerges at the neural level? By using diverse behavioral paradigms and psychophysics, we seek to study how the experience of one’s own body emerges and shaped by incoming stimuli and stored information.