Mirror-touch synaesthesia: the role of shared ... - UCL Discovery

156
Chapter 9
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Specifically the following questions were
addressed:
1. What is the prevalence of mirror-touch synaesthesia and what
characteristics identify the condition (Chapter 2)?
2. What neurocognitive mechanisms give rise to mirror-touch synaesthesia
(Chapter 2)?
3. Does the presence of synaesthesia have implications for perceptual
processing (Chapter 3)?
4. What are the implications of heightened sensorimotor simulation in mirror-
touch synaesthesia for social cognition (Chapters 4 and 5)?
5. What are the implications of suppressing sensorimotor resources on
expression recognition abilities in healthy adults (Chapters 7 and 8)?
9.2 What is the prevalence of mirror-touch synaesthesia and what
characteristics underpin the condition?
As noted previously, in mirror-touch synaesthesia individuals experience
tactile sensations on their own body simply when observing touch to another person
(Banissy and Ward, 2007; Banissy, Cohen Kadosh, Maus, Walsh, and Ward, 2009;
Blakemore et al., 2005). The mapping between synaesthetic experience (i.e. location
on the synaesthete’s body) and observed-touch (i.e. the location where touch is
perceived on another person’s body) has been shown to vary between mirror-touch
synaesthetes (Banissy and Ward, 2007), with some synaesthetes reporting
synaesthetic experiences as if looking in a mirror (e.g. observed-touch to the left face
elicits a synaesthetic experience on the left cheek of the mirror-touch synaesthete;
specular subtype) and others as if they share the same anatomical body space (e.g.
observed-touch to the left face elicits a synaesthetic experience on the left cheek of