Date of Award

2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Casto, Kathleen

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

A unified experience of oneself in the world is contingent on aspects of embodiment such as body ownership and the sense of agency. This thesis aimed to investigate a) the neural correlates of this bodily-self consciousness as impacted by differential levels of body awareness, and b) how body awareness is connected to a heightened experience of embodiment. Self-reports were used to assess subjects’ extent of body connection, qualities of embodied experience, and frequency of activity related to body awareness. These surveys were the basis for establishing creating an independent variable for participant grouping: high vs. low body-aware. Participants’ cortical activity in parietal and motor areas were measured via functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during a multimodal integration task, which manipulated the congruence of visuomotor signals in order to challenge the sense of agency. Thus, cortical activation was measured during three experimental conditions: congruent, incongruent, and eyes-closed multimodal integration. I hypothesized that high and low body-aware groups would show differences in activation of the inferior parietal lobe during incongruent conditions. The concurrent evidence did not support this hypothesis. However, exploratory analyses revealed that the high body aware group had significantly higher primary motor cortex activity overall, and particularly during the incongruent task. Additionally, the frequency of body awareness related activities was significantly correlated with posterior parietal cortex activation. These results have implications for furthering the understanding of neural mechanisms of bodily-self consciousness, as well as use of body awareness in clinical practice.

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