Neuropsychologia 50 (2012) 181–188 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Neuropsychologia jo u rn al homepa ge : www.elsevier.com/locate/neuropsychologia Body knowledge in brain-damaged children: A double-dissociation in self and other’s body processing Francesca Frassinetti a,b,* , Simona Fiori c , Valentina D’Angelo d , Barbara Magnani a , Andrea Guzzetta d , Daniela Brizzolara c,d , Giovanni Cioni c,d a Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat, 40127 Bologna, Italy b Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri, Clinica del Lavoro e della Riabilitazione, IRCCS – Istituto Scientifico di Castel Goffredo, 46042 Mantova, Italy c Division of Child Neurology and Psychiatry, University of Pisa, 56128 Pisa, Italy d Department of Developmental Neuroscience, IRCCS Stella Maris, 56128 Pisa, Italy a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 29 June 2011 Received in revised form 9 November 2011 Accepted 16 November 2011 Available online 25 November 2011 Keywords: Bodily self-recognition Right brain damaged children a b s t r a c t Bodies are important element for self-recognition. In this respect, in adults it has been recently shown a self vs other advantage when small parts of the subjects’ body are visible. This advantage is lost following a right brain lesion underlying a role of the right hemisphere in self body-parts processing. In order to investigate the bodily-self processing in children and the development of its neuronal bases, 57 typically developing healthy subjects and 17 subjects with unilateral brain damage (5 right and 12 left sided), aged 4–17 years, were submitted to a matching-to-sample task. In this task, three stimuli vertically aligned were simultaneously presented at the centre of the computer screen. Subjects were required which of two stimuli (the upper or the lower one) matched the central target stimulus, half stimuli representing self and half stimuli representing other people’s body-parts and face-parts. The results showed that corporeal self recognition is present since at least 4 years of age and that self and others’ body parts processing are different and sustained by separate cerebral substrates. Indeed, a double dissociation was found: right brain damaged patients were impaired in self but not in other people’s body parts, showing a self-disadvantage, whereas left brain damaged patients were impaired in others’ but not in self body parts processing. Finally, since the double dissociation self/other was found for body-parts but not for face parts, the corporal self seems to be dissociated for body and face-parts. This opens the possibility of independent and lateralized functional modules for the processing of self and other body parts during development. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Corporeal self recognition in adults is well documented by behavioural and neuroimaging studies. Subjects process their own face (or body) in an independent fashion, with respect to the pro- cessing of other people’s face (or body) (Devue et al., 2007; Devue, Van der Stigchel, Brédart, & Theeuwes, 2009; Keenan, Gallup, & Falk, 2003; Sugiura et al., 2006). Exposure to pictures of self vs other bodies can reveal a self related advantage in tasks that do not involve explicit self recognition. Most interestingly, the self vs other advantage can be found even when small parts of the sub- jects’ body are visible. By using a matching-to-sample task in which pictures of static body parts (hands, legs, arms, feet) were visu- ally presented, Frassinetti, Maini, Romualdi, Galante, and Avanzi * Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Viale Berti Pichat, 5-40127 Bologna, Italy. Tel.: +39 051 209 1847; fax: +39 051 243086. E-mail address: francesc.frassinetti@unibo.it (F. Frassinetti). (2008) demonstrated that adults have an advantage in seeing their own, as compared to somebody else’s body parts. Converging data from neuroimaging and TMS studies on healthy subjects suggest that a fronto-parietal network in the right hemisphere is involved in corporeal self recognition (Decety & Chaminade, 2003; Decety & Sommerville, 2003; Keenan, Wheeler, Gallup, & Pascual-Leone, 2000; Molnar-Szakacs, Uddin, & Iacoboni, 2005; Platek, Keenan, Gallup, & Mohamed, 2004; Sugiura et al., 2005, 2006; Theoret et al., 2004; Uddin, Molnar-Szakacs, Zaidel, & Iacoboni, 2006). Besides, Frassinetti et al. (2008) established that only patients with circum- scribed lesions to the right hemisphere, but not to the left one, lose the ability to implicitly process self related body parts when match- ing pictures. Further, patients who are impaired in the processing of self-related body-parts show a preserved self-advantage when processing self-related face-parts, thus providing initial evidence of a modular representation of the corporeal self (Frassinetti et al., 2010). Most of the developmental studies addressing self-recognition focused on mirror self-recognition (Amsterdam, 1972; Bertenthal & Fischer, 1978; Lewis & Brooks, 1978; Marsh, Ellis, & Craven, 0028-3932/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.016