The role of vision and proprioception in implicit and explicit self-movement recognition

Individuals are more accurate in performing body-related perceptual tasks when viewing their own body-parts compared to those of others. This self-advantage phenomenon revealed an implicit (i.e., task irrelevant) recognition process of one’s own body. Indeed, no self-advantage appears when participants have to recognize their own body parts explicitly. Whether this phenomenon extends to one’s own movements recognition remains unknown. Here, we investigated this hypothesis and the role of vision and proprioception in implicit and explicit recognition of one’s own actions. In the implicit task, participants judged the perceived lateral direction (left or right) of their own or others’ arm reaching movements, which were pre-recorded and replayed using an upper-limb exoskeleton. In the explicit task, participants judged whether reaching movements were their own or not. In the visual condition, they observed the exoskeleton executing the reaching movements, while in the proprioceptive condition their arm was passively moved by the exoskeleton. Results showed self-advantage in the implicit recognition task, with participants demonstrating higher accuracy in discriminating their own actions in both visual and proprioceptive modalities. Notably, this self-advantage for actions ownership was also observed in the explicit recognition within the visual modality but was absent in the proprioceptive modality. Thus, individuals can implicitly differentiate distinct proprioceptive and visual kinematic patterns associated with their own movements, this advantage extending to explicit recognition in the visual modality. These findings reveal the role of proprioceptive experience in implicitly favoring action discrimination and highlight the differential influence of visual and proprioceptive cues in motion self-recognition.