Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see

Shared electrophysiology mechanisms of body ownership and motor imagery

“…In a PET study, Tsakiris et al (2007) reported that activity in the right posterior insula, sensorimotor cortices (precentral and postcentral gyri), as well as primary somatosensory cortex was associated with illusory hand ownership. Moreover, activity in the right insula and left somatosensory cortex correlated with the magnitude of proprioceptive drift (Tsakiris et al, 2007), a phenomenon classically associated with illusory hand ownership (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998; but see also Rohde et al, 2011). Finally, clinical studies in stroke patients showed a relationship between lesion location and damaged connections between premotor, frontal operculum, basal ganglia, parietal, and prefrontal cortices with the inability to experience illusory ownership for a fake hand (Zeller et al, 2011).…”

“…This type of sequence was chosen to automatize the stroking patterns that are generally used to manually stroke participants' hands to induce the RHI (i.e. Botvinick and Cohen, 1998;Ehrsson et al, 2004). The direction of the stroking sequence was either inward, toward a central fixation cross (6 subjects), or outward, away from the fixation cross (6 subjects).…”

“…Ownership for one's hand has been proposed to constitute a crucial aspect of bodily selfconsciousness (De Vignemont, 2011;Gallagher, 2000;Makin et al, 2008;Tsakiris, 2010) and an increasing number of empirical data on the neural underpinnings of body ownership have pointed to the importance of multisensory integration of visual, tactile and proprioceptive signals (Botvinick, 2004;Botvinick and Cohen, 1998;Ehrsson et al, 2005;Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005). A widely used paradigm to study the multisensory perception of upper limbs is the rubber hand illusion (RHI; Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) where participants watch an artificial hand (visual cue) being stroked by a paintbrush in synchrony with stroking on their own corresponding and occluded hand (tactile cue). This visuo-tactile manipulation alters bodily experience, inducing the illusion that the artificial hand being touched is one's own hand (measured by questionnaire ratings) and is generally associated with a measurable mislocalization of the participant's hand towards the fake hand.…”

“…This visuo-tactile manipulation alters bodily experience, inducing the illusion that the artificial hand being touched is one's own hand (measured by questionnaire ratings) and is generally associated with a measurable mislocalization of the participant's hand towards the fake hand. The illusion does not occur when the stroking provided to the real hand and the artificial hand is not synchronous, when the fake hand does not match the posture of the real hand, or when control objects are stroked (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998;Ehrsson et al, 2004;Tsakiris and Haggard, 2005).…”

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape

“…Visual‐tactile synchrony has been widely used without VR, in the rubber hand illusion (Botvinick & Cohen, 1998), and the enfacement illusion (Tsakiris, 2008). The same principles can be applied in VR, using an HMD and a live‐feed video from a mannequin being synchronously stroked as the participant's own body (Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008), or a virtual arm being synchronously stroked as the participant's own arm (Slater, Perez‐Marcos, Ehrsson, & Sanchez‐Vives, 2008).…”