In this talk, I will describe findings on a newly documented variant of synaesthesia in which the synaesthete experiences tactile sensations on their own body simply when observing touch to another person (mirror-touch synaesthesia). Functional brain imaging indicates that mirror-touch synaesthesia is linked to heightened neural activity in the same network of brain regions activated by us all when observing touch to others (shared-touch network). This network of brain regions has been suggested to play an important role in our social perception abilities by enabling us to map the experiences of others onto the same sensorimotor representations that are active when we experience the same state. Here, I will describe studies examining the relationship between mirror-touch synaesthesia and broader social perception abilities (e.g., empathy, emotion processing). I will discuss findings indicating that mirror-touch synaesthesia is linked to superior emotion perception and discuss the implications of this for models of social perception.
Editorial: Towards an Understanding of the Relationship Between Spatial Processing Ability and Numerical and Mathematical Cognition
