Santiesteban, Idalmis and Bird, G. and Tew, O. and Cioffi, M.C. and Banissy, M.J. (2015) Mirror-touch synaesthesia: difficulties inhibiting the other. Cortex 71 , pp. 116-121. ISSN 0010-9452.
Abstract
Individuals with mirror touch synaesthesia (MTS) experience touch on their own body when observing others being touched. A recent account proposes that such rare experiences could be linked to impairment in self-other representations. Here we tested participants with MTS on a battery of social cognition tests and found that compared to non-synaesthete controls, the MTS group showed impairment in imitation-inhibition but not in visual perspective taking or theory of mind. Although all of these socio-cognitive abilities rely on the control of self-other representations, they differ as to whether the self, or the other, should be preferentially represented. For imitation-inhibition, representations of the other should be inhibited and self-representations should be enhanced, whereas the opposite is true for visual perspective taking and theory of mind. These findings suggest that MTS is associated with a specific deficit in inhibiting representation of other individuals and shed light on the fractionability of processes underlying typical social cognition.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Mirror-touch synaesthesia, Synaesthesia, Self-other, Social cognition, Imitation inhibition, Perspective taking, Mentalizing |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 23 Jul 2015 10:13 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:17 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/12556 |
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