Abstract
The rubber hand illusion (RHI) allows insights into how the brain resolves conflicting multisensory information regarding body position and ownership. Previous neuroimaging studies have reported a variety of neurophysiological correlates of illusory hand ownership, with conflicting results likely originating from differences in experimental parameters and control conditions. Here, we overcome these limitations by using a fully automated and precisely-timed visuo-tactile stimulation setup to record evoked responses and oscillatory responses in participants who felt the RHI. Importantly, we relied on a combination of experimental conditions to rule out confounds of attention, body-stimulus position and stimulus duration and on the combination of two control conditions to identify neurophysiological correlates of illusory hand ownership. In two separate experiments we observed a consistent illusion-related attenuation of ERPs around 330 ms over frontocentral electrodes, as well as decreases of frontal alpha and beta power during the illusion that could not be attributed to changes in attention, body-stimulus position or stimulus duration. Our results reveal neural correlates of illusory hand ownership in late and likely higher-order rather than early sensory processes, and support a role of premotor and possibly intraparietal areas in mediating illusory body ownership.
Highlights
Philosophy, psychology and neuroscience continue to debate the sources and modulators of conscious experience
Our goal was to study the neural correlates of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) in EEG brain activity by refining the typical protocol used to induce the RHI in three ways: first, by introducing a temporally precise stimulation apparatus that allows the recording of evoked activity that is precisely-time locked to the somatosensory stimulus; second, by comparing neural correlates of the RHI across different control conditions to rule out confounds of attention and body-stimulus position; and third, by testing if the identified neural correlates of the RHI are robust against changes in stimulus duration
We identified neurophysiological correlates of illusionary hand ownership that were consistent across both control conditions and differentiated these from the two confounds by comparing the respective contrasts
Summary
Philosophy, psychology and neuroscience continue to debate the sources and modulators of conscious experience. Self-consciousness refers to the integrated, pre-reflexive experience of being a self in a body and has been related to tactile, vestibular, proprioceptive, as well as visual and motor information (Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005; Blanke, 2012). A widely used paradigm to study body ownership is the rubber hand illusion (RHI; Botvinick, 2004) during which participants watch an artificial rubber hand being stroked in synchrony with strokes on their own occluded hand. This synchronous visuo-tactile stimulation alters bodily experience as it induces the illusion that the rubber hand is one’s own hand
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