Abstract
Previous research suggests that bodily self-identification, bodily self-localization, agency, and the sense of being present in space are critical aspects of conscious full-body self-perception. However, none of the existing studies have investigated the relationship of these aspects to each other, i.e., whether they can be identified to be distinguishable components of the structure of conscious full-body self-perception. Therefore, the objective of the present investigation is to elucidate the structure of conscious full-body self-perception. We performed two studies in which we stroked the back of healthy individuals for three minutes while they watched the back of a distant virtual body being synchronously stroked with a virtual stick. After visuo-tactile stimulation, participants assessed changes in their bodily self-perception with a custom made self-report questionnaire. In the first study, we investigated the structure of conscious full-body self-perception by analyzing the responses to the questionnaire by means of multidimensional scaling combined with cluster analysis. In the second study, we then extended the questionnaire and validated the stability of the structure of conscious full-body self-perception found in the first study within a larger sample of individuals by performing a principle components analysis of the questionnaire responses. The results of the two studies converge in suggesting that the structure of conscious full-body self-perception consists of the following three distinct components: bodily self-identification, space-related self-perception (spatial presence), and agency.
Highlights
A fundamental endeavour of research on human self-perception is the understanding of the experience of one’s own body, i.e., bodily self-perception [1,2]
The statements describing the experience of the virtual body included items referring to bodily self-identification, e.g., ‘‘It felt like the virtual body belonged to me’’; bodily self-localization, e.g., ‘‘It seemed like my body was in the location where the virtual body was’’; and sense of agency, e.g., ‘‘It felt like I could have moved the head of the virtual body, if I had wanted.’’ Most of the questionnaire items were adapted from previous studies on full-body illusions (e.g., [9,10,13]) or from the study on the structure of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) [3] described above
To more formally assess whether the groups of questionnaire items on the multidimensional scaling (MDS) map can be found as actual clusters, we performed a cluster analysis by means of the ICLUST algorithm
Summary
A fundamental endeavour of research on human self-perception is the understanding of the experience of one’s own body, i.e., bodily self-perception [1,2]. The induction of the experience of an artificial limb being part of one’s own body, i.e., its ‘‘embodiment,’’ is one of the most recent approaches to experimentally investigating bodily selfperception. Longo and colleagues [3] used the RHI to investigate the structure of conscious bodily self-perception They found that the experiential dimension ‘‘embodiment of the rubber hand’’ was the main aspect of the RHI, and that it could be decomposed into the following three components of bodily selfperception: ownership, i.e., the perception of the rubber hand as part of oneself; location, i.e., the localization of one’s own hand or of touch applied to one’s own hand in the position of the rubber hand; and sense of agency, i.e., the experience of control over the rubber hand
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