How is it that we feel that we own our body? And how does the brain create this feeling? By manipulating the integration of multisensory signals, researchers have recently begun to probe this question. By creating the illusory experience of owning external body-parts and entire bodies, researchers have investigated the neurofunctional correlates of body ownership. Recent attempts to quantitatively synthesize the neuroimaging literature of body ownership have shown inconsistent results. A large proportion of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) findings on body ownership includes region of interest (ROI) analysis. This analysis approach produces inflated findings when results are synthesized in meta-analyses. We conducted a systematic search of the fMRI literature of ownership of body-parts and entire bodies. Two activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses were conducted, testing the impact of including ROI-based findings. When ROI-based results were included, frontal and posterior parietal multisensory areas were associated with body ownership. However, a whole-brain meta-analysis, excluding ROI-based results, found no significant convergence of activation across the brain. These findings highlight the difficulty of quantitatively synthesizing a neuroimaging field where a large part of the literature is based on findings from ROI analysis. We discuss the difficulty of quantitatively synthesizing results based on ROI analysis and suggest future directions for the study of body ownership within the field of cognitive neuroscience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:his-18853 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Nilsson, Martin |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för biovetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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