Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Since we rarely view our own body movements in our dailylives, understanding the recognition of self-body movementcan shed light on the core of self-awareness and on therepresentation of actions. We first recorded nine simple andnine complex actions performed by individual participants,who also subsequently observed nine videos displayed on thescreen and imitated these actions. After a delay period of 35-40 days, participants were asked to identify their self- bodymovements presented as point-light displays amongst threeother actors who performed the same actions. Participants wereable to recognize themselves solely based on kinematics inpoint-light displays. However, self-recognition accuracyvaried according to the complexity of performed actions, withmore accurate self-recognition for complex than simpleactions. The ability of self-recognition with simple actionsshowed a significant relation with autistic traits (negativerelation: poorer self-recognition accuracy with more autistictraits), schizophrenic traits (quadratic non-linear relation,participants with the median degree of schizophrenia traitsperformed better than participants at the extremes), and withimitation actions and motor imagery traits (linear relation:increased self-recognition accuracy with greater motorimagery). We also found that participants did not recognizeactions that only required visual experience but could identifytheir self-generated actions that required motor experience,underscoring the importance of motor experience to therepresentation of self-body movements.