Abstract
When subjects look at a rubber hand being brush-stroked synchronously with their own hidden hand, they might feel a sense of ownership over the rubber hand. The perceived mislocalization of the own hand towards the rubber hand (proprioceptive drift) would reflect an implicit marker of this illusion occurring through the dominance of vision over proprioception. This account, however, contrasts with principles of multisensory integration whereby percepts result from a “statistical sum” of different sensory afferents. In this case, the most-known proprioceptive drift should be mirrored by complementary visual drift of the rubber hand in the opposite direction. We investigated this issue by designing two experiments in which subjects were not only requested to localize their own hand but also the rubber hand and further explored the subjective feeling of the illusion. In both experiments, we demonstrated a (visual) drift in the opposite direction of the proprioceptive drift, suggesting that both hands converge toward each other. This might suggest that the spatial representations of the two hands are integrated in a common percept placed in between them, contradicting previous accounts of substitution of the real hand by the rubber hand.
Highlights
The sense of body ownership refers to the implicit and explicit experience that your body belongs to you and constitutes one of the fundamental basic aspects of self-awareness[1]
Several studies have demonstrated that percepts resulting from the integration of different sensory inputs dynamically depend on the relative reliability of each sensory modality
A general principle for multisensory integration has been proposed that minimizes variance in the final estimate, suggesting that it results from the “statistical sum” of different sensory information, each of which is weighted according to its reliability[11]
Summary
The sense of body ownership refers to the implicit and explicit experience that your body belongs to you and constitutes one of the fundamental basic aspects of self-awareness[1]. One way to experimentally manipulate the sense of body ownership is the rubber hand illusion (RHI)[3]. It has been shown that orienting the rubber hand at 90 or 180 degrees with respect to the subject’s own hand abolishes the illusion, suggesting that visual-proprioceptive congruence is necessary[4]. Such evidence implies, from a Bayesian perspective of multisensory integration[5], that the illusion could only occur if the weighting of conflicting sensory information and their subsequent integration result in a statistically plausible compromise. Optimal integration has been demonstrated for different sensory modalities, including vision and proprioception[12]
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