The body and the self change markedly during adolescence, but how does bodily self-consciousness, the pre-reflexive experience of being a bodily subject, change? We addressed this issue by studying embodiment towards virtual avatars in 70 girls aged 10-17 years. We manipulated the synchrony between participants' and avatars' touch or movement, as well as the avatar visual shape or size relative to each participant's body. A weaker avatar's embodiment in case of mismatch between the body seen in virtual reality and the real body is indicative of a more robust bodily self-consciousness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow we mentally experience our body has been studied in a variety research domains. Each of these domains focuses in its own ways on different aspects of the body, namely the neurophysiological, perceptual, affective or social components, and proposes different conceptual taxonomies. It is therefore difficult to find one's way through this vast literature and to grasp the relationships between the different dimensions of bodily experiences.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent studies have demonstrated that dogs synchronize their locomotor behaviour with that of their owners. The present study aims to improve our understanding of the sensorimotor processes underlying interspecific behavioural synchronization by testing the influence of the number of humans on dogs' behavioural synchronization. We used Global Positioning System (GPS) devices in an outdoor environment to measure dogs' behavioural synchronization to humans during a locomotor activity involving three speeds (static, slow walking and fast walking).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCognitive control and social perception both change during adolescence, but little is known of the interaction of these 2 processes. We aimed to characterize developmental changes in brain activity related to the influence of a social stimulus on cognitive control and more specifically on inhibitory control. Children (age 8-11, = 19), adolescents (age 12-17, = 20), and adults (age 24-40, = 19) performed an antisaccade task with either faces or cars as visual stimuli, during functional magnetic resonance brain imaging.
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