Moffat & Cross (2024) — Awareness of embodiment enhances enjoyment and engages sensorimotor cortices
A preregistered functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study of the neuroaesthetics of synchronous movement: does having performed a movement — motor embodiment — change how much you enjoy watching it, and which cortex is engaged? It is included here as a boundary marker, not as an interoception result. The wiki keeps a small number of papers whose interoceptive relevance is analogical rather than measured (see Zeharia et al. on cortical body maps, Friston on predictive coding in vision); this is another. Its value is precisely in what it is not about.
The two senses of “embodiment”
The word “embodiment” carries at least two distinct constructs, and this wiki is almost entirely about one of them. Moffat & Cross use the motor-simulation sense from the neuroaesthetics tradition (Freedberg & Gallese’s embodied simulation; Calvo-Merino’s expert-dancer studies; Kirsch & Cross): you have an embodied experience of a movement when your own motor system has produced it, and that prior execution shapes how you subsequently perceive and aesthetically appreciate it. The mechanism is the action-observation network (AON: ventral premotor cortex, inferior/middle frontal gyri, superior temporal and inferior parietal cortices), which responds more strongly to executed than observed movement and more strongly to learned than unknown observed movement.
This is a different thing from the interoceptive embodiment the wiki’s embodied-selfhood page is built on — the “material me” grounded in representation and regulation of visceral/physiological state (Craig, Seth, Farb). Motor embodiment is about the body one moves; interoceptive embodiment is about the body one feels from the inside. They share a word and a broad anti-Cartesian commitment, and nothing else load-bearing. Keeping them apart is the reason to file this paper at all.
The one place the two senses genuinely brush against each other is the somatosensory pole of the Farb arc: Wu et al. (2026) ground relapse-protective “embodied self-experience” in somatosensory (postcentral, supramarginal) rather than interoceptive-insular cortex, and this paper’s aesthetic effects also live in sensorimotor cortex (STG, IFG, IPL). Both are “embodiment” in a bodily-sensory rather than strictly interoceptive register — a reminder that “embodied” claims routinely rest on sensorimotor representation with interoception as the generalisation, not the measured signal.
What was done
Forty-three adults (final; 45 recruited) played a mirror game in the scanner: they watched one stick figure move its arms and mirrored it as closely as possible (gaining embodied experience of that sequence), then rated other dyads performing either the same sequence they had mirrored (“performed”) or a different one (“unknown”), presented as two synchronous stick figures. On each rated trial they reported enjoyment, whether the sequence was one they had mirrored, perceived synchrony, and how well the follower matched the leader (a proxy for “embodied empathy”). fNIRS recorded oxygenation over 12 bilateral cortical ROIs (IFG, MFG, premotor, motor, superior temporal, inferior parietal). Analysis was Bayesian multilevel modelling of HbO−HbR difference signals, nine preregistered hypotheses.
What it found
Behaviourally, enjoyment rose with measured synchrony and was highest for sequences that were both mirrored and recognised as mirrored — the “awareness of embodiment” effect. But recognition was near-floor: participants could not actually distinguish sequences they had mirrored from ones they had not, answering “yes” indiscriminately, which confounds embodiment with recognition and is the study’s central behavioural weakness. There was no embodied empathy (mirroring did not change judgements of others’ synchrony) and, surprisingly, cognitive empathy dampened enjoyment, reversing the authors’ own prior result.
Neurally, mirroring beat observation across all ROIs, but observing performed vs unknown movements differed nowhere — the predicted premotor/motor reduction for embodied movement did not appear. Enjoyment tracked left STG activation; recognition of performed movements tracked bilateral STG, left IFG, right IPL — sensorimotor and action-observation regions that also subserve aesthetic processing. The authors conclude that directing attention to the fact of having embodied a movement is what enriches enjoyment of synchrony, with implications for therapies (e.g. mirroring-based interventions for social connection) that they frame cautiously.
Why it is held loosely here
Beyond not being an interoception study, the paper carries its own cautions: a small sample for the individual-difference claims, an empathy finding that contradicts the authors’ earlier work and is not preregistered, a recognition task too hard to separate its two key factors, fNIRS blind to the subcortical reward and salience structures the aesthetic literature cares about, and stick-figure stimuli of uncertain ecological reach. Its durable contribution to this wiki is conceptual hygiene: a clean example of the motor-simulation “embodiment” that the interoceptive literature must not be conflated with.