Manos Tsakiris: "On Agency and Body-ownership"

Lecture by Manos Tsakiris, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London, UK.

Manos Tsakiris studied psychology in Athens, Greece . He then moved to London for postgraduate studies in philosophy and cognitive neuropsychology. He did his PhD at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience , University College London with Patrick Haggard and Chris Frith. His research attempts to explain the neurocognitive principles that underlie the experience of one's body in action and sensation. He is currently a lecturer at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London

Abstract: The recent distinction between sense of agency and sense of body-ownership has attracted considerable empirical and theoretical interest. The respective contributions of central motor signals and peripheral afferent signals to these two varieties of body experience remain unknown. I will consider the methodological problems encountered in the empirical study of agency and body-ownership, and then present a series of experiments that study the interplay between motor and sensory information. In particular, the experiments presented will focus on (i) how multisensory signals interact with body representations to generate the sense of body-ownership, (ii) how the sense of agency modulates the sense of body-ownership, and (iii) on the respective roles of efferent and afferent signals for  self-recognition. The complex relations between agency and body-ownership will be considered in the light of recent neurophilosophical approaches.