Abstract
A question still debated within cognitive neuroscience is whether signals present during actions significantly contribute to the emergence of human’s body ownership. In the present study, we aimed at answer this question by means of a neuropsychological approach. We administered the classical rubber hand illusion paradigm to a group of healthy participants and to a group of neurological patients affected by a complete left upper limb hemiplegia, but without any propriceptive/tactile deficits. The illusion strength was measured both subjectively (i.e., by a self-report questionnaire) and behaviorally (i.e., the location of one’s own hand is shifted towards the rubber hand). We aimed at examining whether, and to which extent, an enduring absence of movements related signals affects body ownership. Our results showed that patients displayed, respect to healthy participants, stronger illusory effects when the left (affected) hand was stimulated and no effects when the right (unaffected) hand was stimulated. In other words, hemiplegics had a weaker/more flexible sense of body ownership for the affected hand, but an enhanced/more rigid one for the healthy hand. Possible interpretations of such asymmetrical distribution of body ownership, as well as limits of our results, are discussed. Broadly speaking, our findings suggest that the alteration of the normal flow of signals present during movements impacts on human’s body ownership. This in turn, means that movements have a role per se in developing and maintaining a coherent body ownership.
Highlights
Body ownership is the conscious experience of the body as one’s own [1]
The rubber hand illusion effects are explained with the fact that when the rubber hand is congruent with the participant’s hand in terms of posture and identity, the conflict between somatosensory representations of the own hand and vision of the fake hand disappears in favor of a strong multisensory integration
The prerequisite to be included in this study was the presence of a complete left upper limb hemiplegia and no tactile loss
Summary
Body ownership is the conscious experience of the body as one’s own [1]. it is an ubiquitous perceptual experience that stands at the root of human nature since we all sense what it’s like having a body and we experience the boundaries between our own body and the external world [2].Recent theoretical and methodological advances have leaded to the development of new approaches to examine in depth the neurocognitive processes underpinning the conscious experiencePLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0117155 March 16, 2015Movements and Body Ownership of one’s own body. Body ownership is the conscious experience of the body as one’s own [1]. One of the most compelling demonstration of the mechanisms subserving body ownership has been obtained in healthy participants by means of an experimental manipulation in which the physical constraints subserving body ownership are altered. Such paradigm is known as the ‘rubber hand illusion’ [3]. It is worth noticing that incongruent rubber hand postures, incongruent identity (e.g., neutral objects) does not seem to induce the illusion (e.g., [8]). Other recent approaches have extended this paradigm to the whole body by employing virtual reality [11,12]
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