Going beyond the boundaries between self and other

Bodily self-representation is considered to be built along development and then keep relatively stable in the adult life. We propose rather that the representations of self and others are constantly updated through social interactions. The integration of visual and tactile information pertaining one's own and other persons' body might play a critical role in such representations. In the present study we show that sharing multisensory experience with others might modify both the representation of the self in relation to the other, and the processing of shared sensory stimuli. As previously shown, the perception of tactile stimuli on one's own face is stronger when viewing touch towards one's own face as compared to when viewing touch towards another person's face (Visual remapping of touch effect, VRT;Serino et al., 2008). Behaviourally and psychometrically we show that, if subjects observe another person's face being stroked and are stroked on their own face simultaneously (Tsakiris, 2008), the self-related enhancement of VRT disappears, so that tactile perception is analogously influenced by viewing touch on the self and on the other. These findings suggest that the boundaries between the representation of the self and the other might be overcome by shared multisensory experiences.