Abstract
Body representations are readily expanded based on sensorimotor experience. A dynamic view of body representations, however, holds that these representations cannot only be expanded but that they can also be narrowed down by disembodying elements of the body representation that are no longer warranted. Here we induced illusory ownership in terms of a moving rubber hand illusion and studied the maintenance of this illusion across different conditions. We observed ownership experience to decrease gradually unless participants continued to receive confirmatory multisensory input. Moreover, a single instance of multisensory mismatch – a hammer striking the rubber hand but not the real hand – triggered substantial and immediate disembodiment. Together, these findings support and extend previous theoretical efforts to model body representations through basic mechanisms of multisensory integration. They further support an updating model suggesting that embodied entities fade from the body representation if they are not refreshed continuously.
Highlights
Changing the physical appearance of the body is not easy, as most people will agree when thinking about their New Years resolutions
We focused on the ratings 30 s before the intervention, right after the intervention, and at the end of the disembodiment phase
The current data show that newly embodied body parts gradually fade from the body representation unless they are maintained continuously by multisensory matching
Summary
Changing the physical appearance of the body is not easy, as most people will agree when thinking about their New Years resolutions. Changing the mental representation of our body is surprisingly flexible and dynamic (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998). While there is good evidence that we quickly learn to acquire alien body parts (e.g., Ma & Hommel, 2015), it is less clear what happens to these representations after acquisition. The present experiment targets the maintenance of body representations in precisely these situations. Support for the view that our body representation is not fixed, but malleable, comes from multisensory illusions, such as the rubber-hand illusion. Participants view a rubber hand being stroked while their own hand is hidden from view. If the participants’ hand is stroked synchronously with the rubber hand, participants report vivid feelings of body
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