Frederique de Vignemont

Recent evidence in cognitive neuroscience indicates that the visual system is influenced by the outcome of an early appraisal mechanism that automatically evaluates what is seen as being harmful or beneficial for the organism. This indicates that there could be valence in perception. But what could it mean for one to see something positively or negatively? Although most theories of emotions accept that valence involves being related to values, the nature of this relation remains highly debated. Some explain valence in terms of evaluative content, others in terms of evaluative attitude. Here I shall argue that an account of affective perception in terms of attitude has more chance of succeeding. To do so, I will first highlight the difficulties that a content-based approach faces, considering the many forms that it might take. I will conclude that seeing the world positively or negatively involves more than a positive or negative content; it involves a distinctive attitude, but which one? Should it be conceived of in imperative or evaluative terms? And what makes this attitude distinct from a proper emotion?

Étant donné la confusion conceptuelle quant à la définition même de l’empathie, il me paraît utile d’en distinguer deux formes spécifiques, l’empathie miroir et l’empathie reconstructive. Dans les deux cas, je partage l’émotion de l’autre, mais de manières différentes. Brièvement, l’empathie miroir est provoquée par la perception d’indices émotionnels, tandis que l’empathie reconstructive est induite par la simulation de la situation émotionnelle de l’autre. J’analyse ici plus en détail leur spécificité respective, ainsi que leurs limites.Given the general confusion surrounding the notion of empathy, it is useful to distinguish between two different types of empathy, mirroring empathy and reconstructive empathy. Both kinds of empathy involve emotional sharing. But they are generated by different mechanisms. Mirroring empathy is induced by the mere observation of emotional cues, whereas reconstructive empathy is induced by the simulation of the emotional situation of other. Here I analyze each notion of empathy in more detail

On the one hand, it is often assumed that the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is constrained by a structural body model so that one cannot implement supernumerary limbs. On the other hand, several recent studies reported illusory duplication of the right hand in subjects exposed to two adjacent rubber hands. The present study tested whether spatial constraints may affect the possibility of inducing the sense of ownership to two rubber hands located side by side to the left of the subject's hand. We found that only the closest rubber hand appeared both objectively (proprioceptive drift) and subjectively (ownership rating) embodied. Crucially, synchronous touch of a second, but farther, rubber hand disrupted the objective measure of the RHI, but not the subjective one. We concluded that, in order to elicit a genuine RHI for multiple rubber hands, the two rubber hands must be at the same distance from the subject's hand/body

We offer an account of empathetic pain that preserves the distinctions among standard pain, contagious pain, empathetic pain, sympathy for pain, and standard pain ascription. Vicarious experiences of both contagious and empathetic pain resemble to some extent experiences of standard pain. But there are also crucial dissimilarities. As neuroscientific results show, standard pain involves a sensorimotor and an affective component. According to our account, contagious pain consists in imagining the former, whereas empathetic pain consists in imagining the latter. We further argue that awareness of another's standard pain is part of empathetic pain, but empathetic awareness of another's standard pain differs from believing that another is in standard pain

The body may be the object we know the best. It is the only object from which we constantly receive a flow of information through sight and touch; and it is the only object we can experience from the inside, through our proprioceptive, vestibular, and visceral senses. Yet there have been very few books that have attempted to consolidate our understanding of the body as it figures in our experience and self-awareness. This volume offers an interdisciplinary and comprehensive treatment of bodily self-awareness, the first book to do so since the landmark 1995 collection The Body and the Self, edited by José Bermúdez, Naomi Eilan, and Anthony Marcel. Since 1995, the study of the body in such psychological disciplines as cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, and neuropsychology has advanced dramatically, accompanied by a resurgence of philosophical interest in the significance of the body in our mental life. The sixteen specially commissioned essays in this book reflect the advances in these fields. The book is divided into three parts, each part covering a topic central to an explanation of bodily self-awareness: representation of the body; the sense of bodily ownership; and representation of the self. ContributorsAdrian Alsmith, Brianna Beck, José Luis Bermúdez, Anna Berti, Alexandre Billon, Andrew J. Bremner, Lucilla Cardinali, Tony Cheng, Frédérique de Vignemont, Francesca Fardo, Alessandro Farnè, Carlotta Fossataro, Shaun Gallagher, Francesca Garbarini, Patrick Haggard, Jakob Hohwy, Matthew R. Longo, Tamar Makin, Marie Martel, Melvin Mezue, John Michael, Christopher Peacocke, Lorenzo Pia, Louise Richardson, Alice C. Roy, Manos Tsakiris, Hong Yu Wong.

The brain represents the body in different ways for different purposes. Several concepts and even more numerous labels have historically been proposed to define these representations in operational terms. Recent evidence of embodiment of external objects has added complexity to an already quite intricate picture. In particular, because of their perceptual and motor effects, both rubber hands and tools can be conceived as embodied, that is, represented in the brain as if they were parts of one's own body. But are there any limits to what we can embody? What constraints lay upon embodiment? And are they similar both for motor embodiment and for perceptual embodiment? Here, we consider the implications emerging from the different, and up-to-now relatively separate research domains of tool use and rubber hand illusion for understanding the rules of embodiment. In particular, we compare what the embodiment of tools and prostheses may or may not have in common. We conclude that in both cases, although for different reasons and with different constraints, embodiment is only partial.

Theories of embodied cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear how to understand them. We offer several interpretations of embodiment, the most interesting being the thesis that mental representations in bodily formats (B-formats) have an important role in cognition. Potential B-formats include motoric, somatosensory, affective and interoceptive formats. The literature on mirroring and related phenomena provides support for a limited-scope version of embodied social cognition under the B-format interpretation. It is questionable, however, whether such a thesis can be extended. We show the limits of embodiment in social cognition.

Motor imagery provides a direct insight into action representations. The aim of the present study was to investigate the level of impairment of action monitoring in schizophrenia by evaluating the performance of schizophrenic patients on mental rotation tasks. We raised the following questions: Are schizophrenic patients impaired in motor imagery both at the explicit and at the implicit level? Are body parts more difficult for them to mentally rotate than objects? Is there any link between the performance and the hallucinating symptom profile? The schizophrenic patients displayed the same pattern of performance as the control subjects . More particularly, schizophrenic patients’ reaction time varied as a function of the angular disparity of the stimuli. On the other hand, they were significantly slower and less accurate. Interestingly, patients suffering from hallucinations made significantly more errors than non-hallucinatory patients. We discussed these latter results in terms of deficit of the forward model. We emphasized the necessity to distinguish different levels of action, more or less impaired in schizophrenia

Pain is unpleasant. It is something that one avoids as much as possible. One might then claim that one wants to avoid pain because one cares about one's body. On this view, individuals who do not experience pain as unpleasant and to be avoided, like patients with pain asymbolia, do not care about their body. This conception of pain has been recently defended by Bain [2014] and Klein [forthcoming]. In their view, one needs to care about one's body for pain to have motivational force. But does one need to care about one's body qua one's own? Or does one merely need to care about the body that happens to be one's own? In this paper, I will consider various interpretations of the notion of bodily care, in light of a series of pathological cases in which patients report pain in a body part that they do not experience as their own. These cases are problematic if one adopts a first-personal interpretation of bodily care, according to which pain requires one to care about what is represented as one's own body. Th..

How do I know that I am the person who is moving? According to Wittgenstein (1958), the sense of agency involves a primitive notion of the self used as subject, which does not rely on any prior perceptual identification and which is immune to error through misidentification. However, the neuroscience of action and the neuropsychology of schizophrenia show the existence of specific cognitive processes underlying the sense of agency—the ‘‘Who'' system (Georgieff & Jeannerod, 1998) which is disrupted in delusions of control (Frith, 1992). Yet, we have to be careful in the interpretation of such clinical symptoms, which cannot be so easily reduced to deficit of action monitoring or to lack of action awareness. Moreover, we should refine the definition of the sense of agency by distinguishing the sense of initiation and the sense of one's own movements. A conceptual analysis of the empirical data will lead us to establish the taxonomy of the different levels of action representations.

Self-knowledge seems to be radically different from the knowledge of other people. However, rather than focusing on the gap between self and others, we should emphasize their commonality. Indeed, different mirror matching mechanisms have been found in monkeys as well as in humans showing that one uses the same representations for oneself and for the others. But do these shared representations allow one to report the mental states of others as if they were one''s own? I intend in this essay to address the epistemic problem of other minds by developing Ayer''s notion of co-consciousness

According to Gurwitsch, the body is at least at the margin of consciousness. If all components of the field of consciousness were experienced as equally salient, we would indeed not be able to think and behave appropriately. Though the body may become the focus of our conscious field when we are introspectively aware of it, it remains most of the time only at the background of consciousness. However, we may wonder if bodily states do really need to be conscious, even at the margin, or cannot be simply non-conscious. Action control requires permanent proprioceptive and visual feedback about the state and the position of our body parts. Experimental data show that action monitoring operates at a nonconscious level and we may similarly suggest that we have a continuous unconscious access to bodily information. In this chapter, I thus intend to describe the various levels of body representations with the help of Gurwitsch's distinction. I will investigate the properties and the function of each of these levels.

L’hystérie se définit comme un déficit fonctionnel sans cause organique. Par exemple, certains patients sont incapables de se mouvoir volontairement, comme s’ils étaient véritablement paralysés, sans que l’on puisse fournir une explication physiologique. À l’inverse, les patients souffrant d’anosognosie sont véritablement paralysés, mais affirment pouvoir bouger. Ces pathologies résultent toutes deux d’un trouble de la conscience de la capacité à agir : les uns croient qu’ils ne peuvent pas agir alors qu’ils le pourraient et les autres croient pouvoir agir alors qu’ils en sont incapables. Mais de quoi dépend cette forme spécifique de conscience ? En comparant ces deux syndromes miroirs, je chercherai à révéler les processus mis en jeu par la conscience de la capacité à agir et à jeter un jour nouveau sur l’hystérie. S’agit-il d’un trouble de la volonté, et si oui, à quel niveau se produit-il ? J’analyserai ainsi les relations respectives entre la conscience de la capacité d’agir et la conscience d’agir, et montrerai le rôle joué par l’image corporelle

Recent imaging results suggest that individuals automatically share the emotions of others when exposed to their emotions. We question the assumption of the automaticity and propose a contextual approach, suggesting several modulatory factors that might influence empathic brain responses. Contextual appraisal could occur early in emotional cue evaluation, which then might or might not lead to an empathic brain response, or not until after an empathic brain response is automatically elicited. We propose two major roles for empathy; its epistemological role is to provide information about the future actions of other people, and important environmental properties. Its social role is to serve as the origin of the motivation for cooperative and prosocial behavior, as well as help for effective social communication.

The philosophical world is indebted to Alvin Goldman for a number of reasons, and among them, his defense of the relevance of cognitive science for philosophy of mind. In Simulating minds , Goldman discusses with great care and subtlety a wide variety of experimental results related to mindreading from cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology and developmental psychology. No philosopher has done more to display the resourcefulness of mental simulation. I am sympathetic with much of the general direction of Goldman’s theory. I agree with him that mindreading is not a single system based on a single mechanism. And I admire his attempt to bring together the cognitive neuroscientific discovery of mirror system phenomena and the philosophical account of pretense within a unique theoretical framework of mental simulation. To do so, Goldman distinguishes two types of mindreading, respectively, based on low-level and high-level simulation. Yet, I wonder in what sense they are really two distinct processes. Here, I will confine myself largely to spelling out a series of points that take issue with the distinction between low-level and high-level mindreading.

There are two main pathways to investigate the sense of body ownership, (i) through the study of the conditions of embodiment for an object to be experienced as one's own and (ii) through the analysis of the deficits in patients who experience a body part as alien. Here, I propose that E is embodied if some properties of E are processed in the same way as the properties of one's body. However, one must distinguish among different types of embodiment, and only self-specific embodiment can lead to feelings of ownership. I address issues such as the functional role and the dynamics of embodiment, degrees and measures of ownership, and shared body representations between self and others. I then analyse the interaction between ownership and disownership. On the one hand, I show that there is no evidence that in the Rubber Hand Illusion, the rubber hand replaces the biological hand. On the other hand, I argue that the sense of disownership experienced by patients towards their body part cannot be reduced to the mere lack of ownership

There seems to be no dimension of bodily awareness that cannot be disrupted. To account for such variety, there is a growing consensus that there are at least two distinct types of body representation that can be impaired, the body schema and the body image. However, the definition of these notions is often unclear. The notion of body image has attracted most controversy because of its lack of unifying positive definition. The notion of body schema, onto which there seems to be a more widespread agreement, also covers a variety of sensorimotor representations. Here, I provide a conceptual analysis of the body schema contrasting it with the body image as well as assess whether the body schema can be specifically impaired, while other types of body representation are preserved; and the body schema obeys principles that are different from those that apply to other types of body representation.

One way to characterize the special relation that one has to one's own body is to say that only one's body appears to one from the inside. Although widely accepted, the nature of this specific experiential mode of presentation of the body is rarely spelled out. Most definitions amount to little more than lists of the various body senses (including senses of posture, movement, heat, pressure, and balance). It is true that body senses provide a kind of informational access to one's own body, which one has to no other bodies, by contrast to external senses like vision, which can take many bodies as their object. But a theory of bodily awareness needs to take into account recent empirical evidence that indicates that bodily awareness is infected by a plague of multisensory effects, regardless of any dichotomy between body senses and external senses. Here I will argue in favour of a multimodal conception of bodily awareness. I will show that the body senses fail to fully account for the content of bodily experiences. I will then propose that vision helps compensate for the insufficiencies of the body senses in people who can see. I will finally argue that the multimodality of bodily experiences does not prevent privileged access to one's body.

Does the existence of body representations undermine the explanatory role of the body? Or do certain types of representation depend so closely upon the body that their involvement in a cognitive task implicates the body itself? In the introduction of this special issue we explore lines of tension and complement that might hold between the notions of embodiment and body representations, which remain too often neglected or obscure. To do so, we distinguish two conceptions of embodiment that either put weight on the explanatory role of the body itself or body representations. We further analyse how and to what extent body representations can be said to be embodied. Finally, we give an overview of the full volume articulated around foundational issues (How should we define the notion of embodiment? To what extent and in what sense is embodiment compatible with representationalism? To what extent and in what sense are sensorimotor approaches similar to behaviourism?) and their applications in several cognitive domains (perception, concepts, selfhood, social cognition)

Abstract: What grounds the experience of our body as our own? Can we rationally doubt that this is our own body when we feel sensations in it? This article shows how recent empirical evidence can shed light on issues on the body and the self, such as the grounds of the sense of body ownership and the immunity to error through misidentification of bodily self-ascriptions. In particular, it discusses how bodily illusions (e.g., the Rubber Hand Illusion), bodily disruptions (e.g., somatoparaphrenia), and the multimodal nature of bodily self-knowledge challenge a classic view of ownership and immunity that puts bodily sensations at its core