Abstract
The sense of ownership of one's body is important for survival, e.g., in defending the body against a threat. However, in addition to affecting behavior, it also affects perception of the world. In the case of visuospatial perception, it has been shown that the sense of ownership causes external space to be perceptually scaled according to the size of the body. Here, we investigated the effect of ownership on another fundamental aspect of visual perception: visual awareness. In two binocular rivalry experiments, we manipulated the sense of ownership of a stranger's hand through visuotactile stimulation while that hand was one of the rival stimuli. The results show that ownership, but not mere visuotactile stimulation, increases the dominance of the hand percept. This effect is due to a combination of longer perceptual dominance durations and shorter suppression durations. Together, these results suggest that the sense of body ownership promotes visual awareness.
Highlights
Upon opening one’s eyes and looking down at one’s body, one becomes visually aware of one’s hands, legs, and chest without exerting any effort
Body ownership was induced when a participant received tactile stimulation of his or her own hand in a manner that was synchronous with and spatially congruent to the object that touched the hand in the image
Participants who reported stronger ownership had a greater effect of visuotactile stimulation on the dominance of that hand image
Summary
Upon opening one’s eyes and looking down at one’s body, one becomes visually aware of one’s hands, legs, and chest without exerting any effort. Most research on body ownership has focused on the perceptual rules that determine the rubber-hand illusion and similar ownership illusions These studies have shown that for ownership of an artificial hand to be induced, the hand must be placed in the same orientation as the real hand, and visuotactile stimulation applied to the rubber hand must be synchronously applied in the same direction as that applied to the veridical hand (Makin et al, 2008). From this line of research, it is clear that the rubber-hand illusion is a multisensory illusion (Ehrsson, 2012; Graziano and Botvinick, 2002; Tsakiris, 2010) and that ownership of limbs (Makin et al, 2008) and full bodies (Blanke et al, 2015; Ehrsson, 2012; Petkova and Ehrsson, 2008) depends on the dynamic integration of spatially and temporally congruent visual, tactile and proprioceptive information from a space near the body
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