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

The recognition of one's own body is a fundamental component of body self-representation. While several studies have reported a self-advantage (enhanced performance when processing one's own body parts), this phenomenon appears complex and inconsistently observed across tasks. In particular, a self-advantage often emerges in implicit tasks, where self-recognition is incidental, whereas explicit self-recognition tasks sometimes reveal no advantage or even a self-disadvantage. Although previous research has examined various aspects of movement self-recognition, systematic investigations directly comparing self-advantage effects in implicit versus explicit recognition of one's own movements, and disentangling the respective contributions of vision and proprioception within this framework, remain scarce. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the self-advantage effect previously reported for static body parts extends to the recognition of one's own movements, in visual and proprioceptive conditions. 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 movement 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.