Philosophers and psychologists have long puzzled over our conception of the self and whether we believe it to have physical correlates in the body. It’s hard to get empirical data on a concept as subjective as the location of the self—if the self can be pinpointed at all—but one new study in the journal Consciousness and Cognition suggests we conceive of the self as located in the upper chest. Psychologists Adrian Alsmith of the University of Copenhagen and Matthew Longo of the University of London had ten adults stand in front of a movable metal pointer. In one round of experiments, participants were blindfolded and had to use the pointer to indicate “themselves.” In the next round, volunteers watched as the researchers moved the pointer and told them to stop when it pointed at “themselves.”

To analyze the results, the experimenters divided the body into five regions: lower torso, upper torso, neck, lower face, upper face. In both rounds, responses clustered in the upper torso. “In the morphological structure of the body,” posited Alsmith and Longo, by way of explanation, “The torso is, so to speak, the great continent of the body, relative to which all other body parts are mere peninsulas. Where the torso goes, the body follows.”

Of course, Alsmith and Longo’s sample size is small, and their study is hardly conclusive. Here are some other contenders for the site of the self.

The eyes

For a 2012 paper in the journal Cognition, Yale psychologists Christina Starmans and Paul Bloom devised three experiments to explore children and adults’ beliefs about the location of the self. “To access people’s intuitive sense of the self, we developed an implicit method that asks when an object is closest to a person,” they wrote. “If children and adults consider the self to be equally distributed across the body, or if they think the self has no spatial location, then they should judge that an object is equally close to a person regardless of where on her body it is positioned. However, if people have an intuition that the self is located in a particular part of the body, then they should judge that objects nearer to that part of the body are closest to the person.”

In the first experiment, 50 pre-school children and 52 adults were shown cartoons of a girl named Mary with a fly buzzing around different parts of her body. Participants had to indicate in which pictures the fly was closest to Mary. Bloom and Starmans found that both adults and children tended to say the fly was closest to Mary as it approached her head, and especially her eyes. The effect was particularly strong for children—possibly indicating that this sense of self is innate.