Influence of the body schema on mirror-touch synesthesia

Individuals with mirror-touch synesthesia (MTS) report feeling touch on their own body when seeing someone else being touched. We examined how the body schema - an on-line representation of body position in space - is involved in mapping touch from a viewed body to one's own body. We showed 45 mirror-touch synesthetes videos of a hand being touched, varying the location of the viewed touch by hand (left, right), skin surface (palmar, dorsal) and finger (index, ring). Participant hand posture was either congruent or incongruent with the posture of the viewed hand. After seeing the video, participants were asked to report whether they felt touch on their own body and, if so, the intensity and location of their percepts. We found that participants reported more frequent and more veridical (i.e., felt at the same somatotopic location as the viewed touch) mirror-touch percepts on posturally congruent versus posturally incongruent trials. Furthermore, participant response patterns varied as a function of postural congruence. Some participants consistently felt sensations on the hand surface that was stimulated in the video - even if their hands were in the opposite posture. Other participants' responses were modulated based on their own hand position, such that percepts were more likely to be felt on the upright, plausible hand surface in the posturally incongruent condition. These results provide evidence that mapping viewed touch to one's own body involves an on-line representation of body position in space.