The rubber hand illusion is a perceptual illusion in which participants experience an inanimate rubber hand as their own when they observe this model hand being stroked in synchrony with strokes applied to the person’s real hand, which is hidden. Earlier studies have focused on the factors that determine the elicitation of this illusion, the relative contribution of vision, touch and other sensory modalities involved and the best ways to quantify this perceptual phenomenon. Questionnaires serve to assess the subjective feeling of ownership, whereas proprioceptive drift is a measure of the recalibration of hand position sense towards the rubber hand when the illusion is induced. Proprioceptive drift has been widely used and thought of as an objective measure of the illusion, although the relationship between this measure and the subjective illusion is not fully understood. Here, we examined how long the illusion is maintained after the synchronous visuotactile stimulation stops with the specific aim of clarifying the temporal relationship in the reduction of both subjective ownership and proprioceptive drift. Our results show that both the feeling of ownership and proprioceptive drift are sustained for tens of seconds after visuotactile stroking has ceased. Furthermore, our results indicate that the reduction of proprioceptive drift and the feeling of ownership follow similar time courses in their reduction, suggesting that the two phenomena are temporally correlated. Collectively, these findings help us better understand the relationships of multisensory stimulation, subjective ownership, and proprioceptive drift in the rubber hand illusion.

Body ownership and the sense of agency are two central aspects of bodily self-consciousness. While multiple neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural correlates of body ownership and agency separately, few studies have investigated the relationship between these two aspects during voluntary movement when such experiences naturally combine. By eliciting the moving rubber hand illusion with active or passive finger movements during functional magnetic resonance imaging, we isolated activations reflecting the sense of body ownership and agency, respectively, as well as their interaction, and assessed their overlap and anatomical segregation. We found that perceived hand ownership was associated with activity in premotor, posterior parietal and cerebellar regions, whereas the sense of agency over the hand’s movements was related to activity in the dorsal premotor cortex and superior temporal cortex. Moreover, one section of the dorsal premotor cortex showed overlapping activity for ownership and agency, and somatosensory cortical activity reflected the interaction of ownership and agency with higher activity when both agency and ownership were experienced. We further found that activations previously attributed to agency in the left insular cortex and right temporoparietal junction reflected the synchrony or asynchrony of visuo-proprioceptive stimuli rather than agency. Collectively, these results reveal the neural bases of agency and ownership during voluntary movement. Although the neural representations of these two experiences are largely distinct, there are interactions and functional neuroanatomical overlap during their combination, which has bearing on theories on bodily self-consciousness.