I am delighted this work by @gerardosalvato.bsky.social et al on the relationship between disturbances in the sense of body ownership & temperature regulation is finally published! doi.org/10.1038/s414... Here is a thread on the long, scientific whodunit 1/11 - ThreadSky

katerinafoto.bsky.social • 48 days ago

I am delighted this work by @gerardosalvato.bsky.social et al on the relationship between disturbances in the sense of body ownership & temperature regulation is finally published! https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-55829-7 Here is a thread on the long, scientific whodunit 1/11

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gpagnoni.bsky.social•45 days ago

Hi Katerina, really interesting! I wonder if the causality can go both ways: if a decreased (say, psychologically driven) sense of body ownership (or perhaps a sense of precariousness of the latter) may trigger e.g. … 1/2

gpagnoni.bsky.social•45 days ago

… vasoconstriction in the extremities (the far out provinces of the body) and thus a decrease in skin temperature 2/2

katerinafoto.bsky.social•45 days ago

Interesting! This the direction RHI illusion studies have taken but results are increasingly negative. The latest study cannot strictly speaking distinguish between these possibilities. But...1/4

katerinafoto.bsky.social•45 days ago

clinically, it is noteworthy that pts paradoxically complain of coldness, numbness, stiffness, they do not complain of lack of ownership of that arm, unless misoplegic. So, our hypothesis is that THIS arm cannot be 'relearned' as theirs due to these prediction errors/feelings. 2/4

katerinafoto.bsky.social•45 days ago

Perhaps we can call it a maintenance explanation, not necessary a formation one. In other work our anatomical and cognitive findings show precision optimisation issues, such errors dissociated from predictions, not salient enough to update more abstract, counterfactual self predictions 3/4

katerinafoto.bsky.social•45 days ago

What actually causes the disownership in the first place may indeed be this disconnection and hence the 'petrified' (see Mograbi &Morris) ownership representation, that could also have effects further down the sensory hierarchy as you suggest. I hope that makes sense

katerinafoto.bsky.social•48 days ago

Back in the day when I was a postdoc, we discovered that when pts with R hemi stroke see a realistic rubber hand in peripersonal space, they claim ownership over it. This was a puzzling, unexpected observation on how body ownership can be ‘visually captured’. 2/11
https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awn225

katerinafoto.bsky.social•48 days ago

Almost 10 years later, we replicated the finding in a larger group and noted that the weaker one’s proprioception, the greater “the visual capture of ownership”. Other groups observed similar phenomena too, e.g. Garbarini et al., 2013. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945216302751 3/11

katerinafoto.bsky.social•48 days ago

Yet another paradox emerged: A subset of these pts were willing to accept a plastic hand as theirs so long as they saw it in peripersonal space, but they did not accept their own hand as theirs even when it was in the same spatial position. These phenomena also had different lesional profiles 4/11

katerinafoto.bsky.social•48 days ago

We thus hypothesised that their own arm did not feel as they expected it to feel, and hence they could not accept it as theirs. This could not be explained by vision, or proprioception, so we hypothesised that this prediction error was in the somatosensory domain, e.g. in temperature or touch…5/11

katerinafoto.bsky.social•48 days ago

With @paulmjenkinson.bsky.social we first showed that you can reduce body ownership delusions most successfully with affective social touch , https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcaa034 6/11

katerinafoto.bsky.social•48 days ago

Then, led by Velentina Moro, our Italian colleagues wanted to examine what aberrant somatosensory sensations these patients reported spontaneously. We found out that feelings of coldness and stiffness modulate DSO symptoms. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839322300310X 7/11

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