The body and the self are not the same

Conventional wisdom is that we feel as though our selves are located in our bodies. For example, hugging a child brings both physical closeness as well as closeness of one's representation of the self. New research at the University of Texas at Austin and INSEAD in France, however, has shown this is not always the case.

Researchers Arthur Markman and Miguel Brendl examined the representation of the self in individuals playing video games and found that "people's representations of self are distinct from their representation of particular aspects of their body."

The findings were published in the January issue of Psychological Science.

Study participants played a video game designed to study external localizations of self. A corridor on a computer screen showed the participant's name halfway down the corridor. Words appeared either in front of or behind the name. A joystick was used to move positive words toward their name and negative words away from it. The researchers masured the speed at which the participants pulled the lever.

Previous research without names had shown that participants are faster to make judgments when told to push a lever for negative items and pull it for positive items than the reverse--that is, to push for positive items and pull for negative items. So, people are faster to pull positive words toward themselves and push negative words away from themselves.

However, in the current study which created a separation between the physical body and the self by adding the name, they found that participants were faster to push positive items toward their names rather than to their physical bodies.

"People are actually faster to push the joystick for positive words; which means pushing away from their physical body and toward their name, which serves as a representation of self. Likewise, they are faster to pull the joystick for negative words, which means pulling away from their name, but toward their physical body" the researchers noted.

This finding suggests that "when people are playing with computer games on a screen, that they temporarily locate their self at their location on the screen rather than within their physical body."