Abstract
The experience of owning a body is built upon the integration of exteroceptive, interoceptive, and proprioceptive signals. Recently, it has been suggested that motor signals could be particularly important in producing the feeling of body part ownership. One thus may hypothesize that the strength of this feeling may not be spatially uniform; rather, it could vary as a function of the degree by which different body parts are involved in motor behavior. Given that our dominant hand plays a leading role in our motor behavior, we hypothesized that it could be more strongly associated with one’s self compared to its non-dominant counterpart. To explore whether this possible asymmetry manifests as a stronger implicit association of the right hand (vs left hand) with the self, we administered the Implicit Association Test to a group of 70 healthy individuals. To control whether this asymmetric association is human-body specific, we further tested whether a similar asymmetry characterizes the association between a right (vs left) animal body part with the concept of self, in an independent sample of subjects (N = 70, 140 subjects total). Our results revealed a linear relationship between the magnitude of the implicit association between the right hand with the self and the subject’s handedness. In detail, the strength of this association increased as a function of hand preference. Critically, the handedness score did not predict the association of the right-animal body part with the self. These findings suggest that, in healthy individuals, the dominant and non-dominant hands are differently perceived at an implicit level as belonging to the self. We argue that such asymmetry may stem from the different roles that the two hands play in our adaptive motor behavior.
Highlights
We all experience the solid and constant feeling of owning a body, i.e., the sense of body ownership (de Vignemont, 2011)
We collect a measure of ownership strength toward a body part, i.e., the degree to which the body part is implicitly represented as associated with the self, by taking a different perspective. We explored this association by means of an established and widely-used experimental paradigm, the Implicit Association Task (IAT; Greenwald et al, 1998), which has been already applied to measure the association of concepts and representations with one’s self (Bar-Anan et al, 2006; Trope and Liberman, 2010)
We hypothesized that the degree by which a body part is represented as belonging to the self varies in the degree of its involvement in motor behavior
Summary
We all experience the solid and constant feeling of owning a body, i.e., the sense of body ownership (de Vignemont, 2011). The most renowned is the RHI, which consists of administering a synchronous tactile stimulation on both the subject’s hand occluded from vision and a visible nearby rubber hand (for a review, see Riemer et al, 2019). Due to such visuotactile multisensory conflict, the subject may experience a sense of ownership toward the fake hand. The RHI demonstrates the critical role of vision and somatosensation in shaping the sense of body ownership (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998)
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