Milliseconds Matter: Temporal Order of Visuo-tactile Stimulation Affects the Ownership of a Virtual Hand

Abstract

The sense of body ownership, that one's body belongs to oneself, is a result of the integration of dierent sensory streams. This sense however is not error-free; in 1998 Botvinick and Cohen [3] showed the rubber hand illusion (RHI), an illusion that made a subject feel a rubber hand as their own. An important factor to induce the illusion is the timing of the applied visual and tactile stimulation to the rubber hand. Temporal delays greater than 500ms eliminate the illusory ownership. This study investigates previously unexplored small delays between stimulation modalities and their eect for the perception of the RHI. Through a virtual reality setup of the RHI paradigm, it is shown that small delays can signicantly alter the strength of the illusion. The order of the sensory modality presented plays a catalytic role to whether or not the inter-modal delay will have an eect on the illusion's strength.

A Novel Integrated Information Processing Model of Presence

“…Other studies have found similar results (e.g., Ehrsson, Holmes, & Passingham, 2005;Ehrsson, Wiech, Weiskopf, Dolan, & Passingham, 2007). Usually, a window longer than 500 ms will not induce the illusion (Zoulias, Harwin, Hayashi, & Nasuto, 2016).…”

Being an Avatar “for Real”: A Survey on Virtual Embodiment in Augmented Reality

“…An important factor of the experiments mentioned previously is the timing of the applied stimuli. Zoulias et al [147] emphasized the sensitivity of the illusion to this factor by showing that small delays have negative effects, especially when tactile stimulation precedes visual signal. This influence of synchrony was found in the AR version of the VHI elaborated by Gilbers [1], but its importance has not been assessed as deeply as in VR.…”