Laterality in the rubber hand illusion

Abstract

In patient studies, impairments of sense of body ownership have repeatedly been linked to right-hemispheric brain damage. To test whether a right-hemispheric dominance for sense of body ownership could also be observed in healthy adults, the rubber hand illusion was elicited on both hands of 21 left-handers and 22 right-handers. In this illusion, a participant's real hand is stroked while hidden from view behind an occluder, and a nearby visible hand prosthesis is repeatedly stroked in synchrony. Most participants experience the illusionary perception of touch sensations arising from the prosthesis. The vividness of the illusion was measured by subjective self-reports as well as by skin conductance responses to watching the rubber hand being harmed. Handedness did not affect the vividness of the illusion, but a stronger skin conductance response was observed, when the illusion was elicited on the left hand. These findings suggest a right-hemispheric dominance for sense of body ownership in healthy adults.

Shared electrophysiology mechanisms of body ownership and motor imagery

“…Despite the bilateral pattern of activation at the level of the inverse solution, however, statistical analyses at the single electrode and cluster levels only revealed significant effects over right fronto-parietal regions (whereas the same analysis was not significant at C3 or the left cluster). The present findings are therefore in favor of a selective or predominant right hemispheric involvement in illusory hand ownership and are consistent with a behavioral study reporting stronger illusory ownership in the left hand as opposed to the right hand (Ocklenburg et al, 2010). This right lateralization of hand ownership is further supported by the prevalence of right-hemispheric lesions leading to the neuropsychological condition of somatoparaphrenia, during which patients report abnormal ownership for their left contralesional limb (for a review see Vallar and Ronchi, 2009;Karnath and Baier, 2010).…”

A preliminary investigation into psychophysiological effects of threatening a perceptually embodied rubber hand in healthy human participants

“…Skin conductance response increased in the phases leading up to perceptual embodiment, consistent with other investigations and reflecting general physiological arousal [12,23,24]. The phases leading up to perceptual embodiment have also been associated with various physiological correlates including proprioceptive drift [25], local skin cooling [26,27], local histamine reactivity [28] and alterations of neural activity in the brain [29], although confounding variables reduce the reliability of these correlates as indicators of the subjective experience of the sense of self and body ownership [30,31].…”

Spatial limits on the nonvisual self-touch illusion and the visual rubber hand illusion: Subjective experience of the illusion and proprioceptive drift

“…A second experiment replicated the first and also found no significant difference between the two groups in time of illusion onset. In a more recent study, Ocklenburg, Rüther, Peterburs, Pinnow, and Güntürkün (2011) investigated the visual RHI in 22 right-handed and 21 left-handed participants, and which hand (left or right) was the receptive hand varied within subjects. Using agreement ratings for statements adapted from Botvinick and Cohen (1998), and skin conductance responses to watching the prosthetic hand being approached by a syringe fitted with a needle, the illusion was investigated for both hands, for each participant.…”