Abstract
Experimental manipulations of body ownership have indicated that multisensory integration is central to forming bodily self-representation. Voluntary self-touch is a unique multisensory situation involving corresponding motor, tactile and proprioceptive signals. Yet, even though self-touch is frequent in everyday life, its contribution to the formation of body ownership is not well understood. Here we investigated the role of voluntary self-touch in body ownership using a novel adaptation of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), in which a robotic system and virtual reality allowed participants self-touch of real and virtual hands. In the first experiment, active and passive self-touch were applied in the absence of visual feedback. In the second experiment, we tested the role of visual feedback in this bodily illusion. Finally, in the third experiment, we compared active and passive self-touch to the classical RHI in which the touch is administered by the experimenter. We hypothesized that active self-touch would increase ownership over the virtual hand through the addition of motor signals strengthening the bodily illusion. The results indicated that active self-touch elicited stronger illusory ownership compared to passive self-touch and sensory only stimulation, and show an important role for active self-touch in the formation of bodily self.
Highlights
A fundamental aspect of the experience of the self is the sensation that we have a body and that we control the actions of that body (Merleau-Ponty, 1996; Gallagher, 2000; Jeannerod, 2003)
Experimental Design and Procedure In Experiment 1 we investigated the effect of active stimulation on the sense of illusory self-touch using the somatic version of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm (Ehrsson et al, 2005; White et al, 2010)
Experimental Design and Procedure In Experiment 2, we investigated the effect of active stimulation on the strength of self-touch illusion and sense of illusory ownership over the virtual hand
Summary
A fundamental aspect of the experience of the self is the sensation that we have a body (body ownership) and that we control the actions of that body (agency) (Merleau-Ponty, 1996; Gallagher, 2000; Jeannerod, 2003). We hypothesized that active self-touch would induce stronger illusory self-ownership in the somatic and visual versions of the RHI due to the addition of efferent signals providing additional sensorimotor correspondences We employed both subjective measures of illusory self-touch and illusory self-ownership (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998; Ehrsson et al, 2005; Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005; Lenggenhager et al, 2007; Rohde et al, 2011; Kalckert and Ehrsson, 2012; Pozeg et al, 2014) as measured by questionnaires and objective measures of proprioceptive drift (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998; Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005; Costantini and Haggard, 2007; Lenggenhager et al, 2007; Kammers et al, 2009; Tsakiris, 2010) which are well-established measures of bodily illusions (but see Rohde et al, 2011). Across three experiments and two variants of the RHI we found that active self-touch enhanced the illusory ownership
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