scholarly journals The relationship between virtual body ownership and temperature sensitivity

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (85) ◽  
pp. 20130300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Llobera ◽  
M. V. Sanchez-Vives ◽  
Mel Slater
Keyword(s):  
Temperature Sensitivity ◽  
Tactile Stimulation ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
The Real ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Visual Presence ◽  
Palm Of The Hand ◽  
Real Hand ◽  
Virtual Body

In the rubber hand illusion, tactile stimulation seen on a rubber hand, that is synchronous with tactile stimulation felt on the hidden real hand, can lead to an illusion of ownership over the rubber hand. This illusion has been shown to produce a temperature decrease in the hidden hand, suggesting that such illusory ownership produces disownership of the real hand. Here, we apply immersive virtual reality (VR) to experimentally investigate this with respect to sensitivity to temperature change. Forty participants experienced immersion in a VR with a virtual body (VB) seen from a first-person perspective. For half the participants, the VB was consistent in posture and movement with their own body, and in the other half, there was inconsistency. Temperature sensitivity on the palm of the hand was measured before and during the virtual experience. The results show that temperature sensitivity decreased in the consistent compared with the inconsistent condition. Moreover, the change in sensitivity was significantly correlated with the subjective illusion of virtual arm ownership but modulated by the illusion of ownership over the full VB. This suggests that a full body ownership illusion results in a unification of the virtual and real bodies into one overall entity—with proprioception and tactile sensations on the real body integrated with the visual presence of the VB. The results are interpreted in the framework of a ‘body matrix’ recently introduced into the literature.

scholarly journals The supernumerary rubber hand illusion revisited: perceived duplication of limbs and visuotactile events

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chenggui Fan ◽  
H. Henrik Ehrsson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Body Representation ◽  
Rubber Hand Illusion ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
Real Right ◽  
The Real ◽  
Skin Conductance Responses ◽  
Supernumerary Limbs ◽  
Real Hand

A controversial and unresolved issue in cognitive neuroscience is whether humans can experience supernumerary limbs as part of their own body. Some previous experiments have claimed that it is possible to elicit supernumerary hand illusions based on modified versions of the rubber hand illusion. However, other studies have provided conflicting results that suggest that only one rubber hand can be perceived as one’s own. To address this issue, we developed a supernumerary hand illusion paradigm that allowed us to disambiguate ownership of individual rubber hands from simultaneous ownership of two fake hands. In our setup, the participant’s real right hand was hidden under a platform, while two identical right rubber hands were placed in parallel on top of the platform in direct view of the participant. We applied synchronous strokes to both rubber hands and the real hand (SS), synchronous strokes to one rubber hand and the real hand and asynchronous strokes to the other model hand (AS and SA) or asynchronous strokes to both fake hands in relation to the real hand (AA). Our results demonstrate that a genuine illusion of owning two rubber hands can be elicited and that such a supernumerary hand illusion can be isolated from the sense of ownership of a single rubber hand both in terms of questionnaire ratings and threat-evoked skin conductance responses (SCRs). These findings advance our knowledge about the dynamic flexibility and fundamental constraints of body representation and emphasize the importance of correlated afferent signals for causal inference in body ownership.

scholarly journals Tactile information counteracts the attenuation of rubber hand illusion attributable to increased visuo-proprioceptive divergence

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0244594
Author(s):  
Piotr Litwin ◽  
Beata Zybura ◽  
Paweł Motyka
Keyword(s):  
Elbow Joint ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Tactile Stimulation ◽  
Rubber Hand Illusion ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Joint Position ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
Tactile Information ◽  
The Real ◽  
Position Discrimination

Sense of body ownership is an immediate and distinct experience of one’s body as belonging to oneself. While it is well-recognized that ownership feelings emerge from the integration of visual and somatosensory signals, the principles upon which they are integrated are still intensely debated. Here, we used the rubber hand illusion (RHI) to examine how the interplay of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive signals is governed depending on their spatiotemporal properties. For this purpose, the RHI was elicited in different conditions varying with respect to the extent of visuo-proprioceptive divergence (i.e., the distance between the real and fake hands) and differing in terms of the availability and spatiotemporal complexity of tactile stimulation (none, simple, or complex). We expected that the attenuating effect of distance on illusion strength will be more pronounced in the absence of touch (when proprioception gains relatively higher importance) and absent in the presence of complex tactile signals. Additionally, we hypothesized that participants with greater proprioceptive acuity—assessed using an elbow joint position discrimination task—will be less susceptible to the illusion, but only under the conditions of limited tactile stimulation. In line with our prediction, RHI was attenuated at the farthest distance only when tactile information was absent or simplified, but the attenuation was effectively prevented by the use of complex tactile stimulation—in this case, RHI was comparably vivid at both distances. However, passive proprioceptive acuity was not related to RHI strength in either of the conditions. The results indicate that complex-structured tactile signals can override the influence of proprioceptive signals in body attribution processes. These findings extend our understanding of body ownership by showing that it is primarily determined by informative cues from the most relevant sensory domains, rather than mere accumulation of multisensory evidence.

scholarly journals The Relationship Between Referral of Touch and the Feeling of Ownership in the Rubber Hand Illusion

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arran T. Reader ◽  
Victoria S. Trifonova ◽  
H. Henrik Ehrsson
Keyword(s):  
Positive Relationship ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Rubber Hand Illusion ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Experimental Paradigm ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
The Real ◽  
Strong Positive Relationship ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Real Hand

The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is one of the most commonly used paradigms to examine the sense of body ownership. Touches are synchronously applied to the real hand, hidden from view, and a false hand in an anatomically congruent position. During the illusion one may perceive that the feeling of touch arises from the false hand (referral of touch), and that the false hand is one's own. The relationship between referral of touch and body ownership in the illusion is unclear, and some articles average responses to statements addressing these experiences, which may be inappropriate depending on the research question of interest. To address these concerns, we re-analyzed three freely available datasets to better understand the relationship between referral of touch and feeling of ownership in the RHI. We found that most participants who report a feeling of ownership also report referral of touch, and that referral of touch and ownership show a moderately strong positive relationship that was highly replicable. In addition, referral of touch tends to be reported more strongly and more frequently than the feeling of ownership over the hand. The former observations confirm that referral of touch and ownership are related experiences in the RHI. The latter, however, indicate that when pooling the statements one may obtain a higher number of illusion ‘responders’ compared to considering the ownership statements in isolation. These results have implications for the RHI as an experimental paradigm.

scholarly journals Decreased motor cortex excitability mirrors own hand disembodiment during the rubber hand illusion

eLife ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco della Gatta ◽  
Francesca Garbarini ◽  
Guglielmo Puglisi ◽  
Antonella Leonetti ◽  
Annamaria Berti ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Motor Evoked Potentials ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rubber Hand Illusion ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
Significant Drop ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
The Real ◽  
Motor Cortex Excitability ◽  
Real Hand

During the rubber hand illusion (RHI), subjects experience an artificial hand as part of their own body, while the real hand is subject to a sort of 'disembodiment'. Can this altered belief about the body also affect physiological mechanisms involved in body-ownership, such as motor control? Here we ask whether the excitability of the motor pathways to the real (disembodied) hand are affected by the illusion. Our results show that the amplitude of the motor-evoked potentials recorded from the real hand is significantly reduced, with respect to baseline, when subjects in the synchronous (but not in the asynchronous) condition experience the fake hand as their own. This finding contributes to the theoretical understanding of the relationship between body-ownership and motor system, and provides the first physiological evidence that a significant drop in motor excitability in M1 hand circuits accompanies the disembodiment of the real hand during the RHI experience.

scholarly journals Experiential ownership and body ownership are different phenomena

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Caleb Liang ◽  
Wen-Hsiang Lin ◽  
Tai-Yuan Chang ◽  
Chi-Hong Chen ◽  
Chen-Wei Wu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Distinct Type ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
First Time ◽  
Full Body

AbstractBody ownership concerns what it is like to feel a body part or a full body as mine, and has become a prominent area of study. We propose that there is a closely related type of bodily self-consciousness largely neglected by researchers—experiential ownership. It refers to the sense that I am the one who is having a conscious experience. Are body ownership and experiential ownership actually the same phenomenon or are they genuinely different? In our experiments, the participant watched a rubber hand or someone else’s body from the first-person perspective and was touched either synchronously or asynchronously. The main findings: (1) The sense of body ownership was hindered in the asynchronous conditions of both the body-part and the full-body experiments. However, a strong sense of experiential ownership was observed in those conditions. (2) We found the opposite when the participants’ responses were measured after tactile stimulations had ceased for 5 s. In the synchronous conditions of another set of body-part and full-body experiments, only experiential ownership was blocked but not body ownership. These results demonstrate for the first time the double dissociation between body ownership and experiential ownership. Experiential ownership is indeed a distinct type of bodily self-consciousness.

scholarly journals Virtual training leads to real acute physical, cognitive, and neural benefits on healthy adults: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Trials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalila Burin ◽  
Noriki Yamaya ◽  
Rie Ogitsu ◽  
Ryuta Kawashima
Keyword(s):  
Heart Rate ◽  
Randomized Controlled Trial ◽  
Executive Functions ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Randomized Controlled ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Virtual Body

Abstract Background Keeping a certain level of physical activity has beneficial effects on the body itself but also, surprisingly, on cognition: specifically, physical high-intensity intermittent aerobic exercise (HIE) can show improvement on cognitive executive functions. Although, in some cases performing strength or aerobic training is problematic or not feasible. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) can induce the illusory feeling of ownership and agency over a moving virtual body, therefore showing comparable physiological reactions: for example, if an individual is sitting on a chair but his virtual body climbs a hill, the individual’s heart rate increases coherently, as if he is actually walking. In this study, we investigate whether this same illusion can show beneficial consequences on the body as well as on executive functions (using the color-word matching Stroop task) and on its neural substrates (using functional near-infrared spectroscopy [fNIRS]). Methods In a cross-over randomized controlled trial, 30 healthy young adults will experience HIE training in IVR (i.e. the virtual body will perform eight sets of 30 s of running followed by 30 s of slow walking, while the participant is completely still) according to two random-ordered conditions: during the experimental condition, the virtual body is displayed in first-person perspective (1PP), while in the control condition, the virtual body is displayed in third-person perspective (3PP). To confirm that individuals have the illusion of ownership and agency over the virtual body in 1PP (and not in 3PP), we will record the heart rate, in addition to subjective questionnaires. Before and after every IVR sessions (one week apart), we will measure cortical hemodynamic changes in the participants’ prefrontal cortex using the fNIRS device during the Stroop task’s execution. Discussion From a theoretical perspective, we could prove that the sense of body ownership and agency can modulate physical and cognitive parameters, even in the absence of actual movements; from a clinical perspective, these results could be useful to train cognition and body simultaneously, in a completely safe environment. Trial registration University Hospital Medical Information Network Clinical Trial Registry, UMIN000034255. Registered on 1 October 2018.

scholarly journals Virtual training leads to real acute physical, cognitive and neural benefits on healthy adults: study protocol for a randomized-controlled trial

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalila Burin ◽  
Noriki Yamaya ◽  
Rie Ogitsu ◽  
Ryuta Kawashima
Keyword(s):  
Heart Rate ◽  
Randomized Controlled Trial ◽  
Executive Functions ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Randomized Controlled ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Virtual Body

Abstract BACKGROUND Keeping a certain level of physical activity has beneficial effects on the body itself but also, surprisingly, on cognition: specifically, physical high-intensity intermittent aerobic exercise (HIE) can show improvement on cognitive executive functions. Although, in some cases performing strength or aerobic training is problematic or not feasible. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) can induce the illusory feeling of ownership and agency over a moving virtual body, showing therefore comparable physiological reactions: for example, if a subject is sitting on a chair but the own virtual body climbs a hill, the subject’s heart rate increases coherently, as if he’s actually walking. In this study, we want to investigate whether this same illusion can show beneficial consequences on the body but also on executive functions (using the colour-word matching Stroop task) and on its neural substrates (using the functional near infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS). METHODS In a cross-over randomized controlled trial, 30 healthy young adults will experience a HIE training in IVR (i.e., the virtual body will perform eight sets of 30 seconds of running followed by 30 seconds of slow walking, while the subject is completely still) according to two random-ordered conditions: during the experimental condition, the virtual body is displayed in the first-person perspective (1PP), while in the control condition, the virtual body is displayed in third-person perspective (3PP). To confirm that in 1PP (and not in 3PP) subjects have the illusion of ownership and agency over the virtual body, we will record the heart rate, in addition to subjective questionnaires. Before and after every IVR sessions (one week apart), we will measure cortical hemodynamic changes in the participants’ prefrontal cortex (PFC) using the fNIRS device during the Stroop task’s execution. DISCUSSION From a theoretical perspective, we could prove that the sense of body ownership and agency can modulate physical and cognitive parameters, even in absence of actual movements; from a clinical perspective, these results could be useful to train cognition and body simultaneously, in a completely safe environment. Trial registration University Hospital Medical Information Network Clinical Trial Registry, UMIN000034255. Registered on 1st October 2018.

scholarly journals Virtual training leads to real acute physical, cognitive and neural benefits on healthy adults: study protocol for a randomized-controlled trial

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dalila Burin ◽  
Noriki Yamaya ◽  
Rie Ogitsu ◽  
Ryuta Kawashima
Keyword(s):  
Heart Rate ◽  
Randomized Controlled Trial ◽  
Executive Functions ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy ◽  
Randomized Controlled ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Virtual Body

Abstract BACKGROUND: Keeping a certain level of physical activity has beneficial effects on the body itself but also, surprisingly, on cognition: specifically, physical high-intensity intermittent aerobic exercise (HIE) can show improvement on cognitive executive functions. Although, in some cases performing strength or aerobic training is problematic or not feasible. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) can induce the illusory feeling of ownership and agency over a moving virtual body, showing therefore comparable physiological reactions: for example, if a subject is sitting on a chair but the own virtual body climbs a hill, the subject’s heart rate increases coherently, as if he’s actually walking. In this study, we want to investigate whether this same illusion can show beneficial consequences on the body but also on executive functions (using the colour-word matching Stroop task) and on its neural substrates (using the functional near infrared spectroscopy, fNIRS). METHODS: In a cross-over randomized controlled trial, 30 healthy young adults will experience a HIE training in IVR (i.e., the virtual body will perform eight sets of 30 seconds of running followed by 30 seconds of slow walking, while the subject is completely still) according to two random-ordered conditions: during the experimental condition, the virtual body is displayed in the first-person perspective (1PP), while in the control condition, the virtual body is displayed in third-person perspective (3PP). To confirm that in 1PP (and not in 3PP) subjects have the illusion of ownership and agency over the virtual body, we will record the heart rate, in addition to subjective questionnaires. Before and after every IVR sessions (one week apart), we will measure cortical hemodynamic changes in the participants’ prefrontal cortex (PFC) using the fNIRS device during the Stroop task’s execution. DISCUSSION: From a theoretical perspective, we could prove that the sense of body ownership and agency can modulate physical and cognitive parameters, even in absence of actual movements; from a clinical perspective, these results could be useful to train cognition and body simultaneously, in a completely safe environment. Trial registration University Hospital Medical Information Network Clinical Trial Registry, UMIN000019832. Registered on 25st September 2018.

scholarly journals Embodied Precision: Intranasal Oxytocin Modulates Multisensory Integration

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 592-606 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Crucianelli ◽  
Yannis Paloyelis ◽  
Lucia Ricciardi ◽  
Paul M. Jenkinson ◽  
Aikaterini Fotopoulou
Keyword(s):  
Multisensory Integration ◽  
Tactile Stimulation ◽  
Estimation Error ◽  
The Body ◽  
Multisensory Perception ◽  
Subjective Feeling ◽  
Body Ownership ◽  
Rubber Hand ◽  
Perceptual Inference ◽  
Multisensory Input

Multisensory integration processes are fundamental to our sense of self as embodied beings. Bodily illusions, such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI) and the size–weight illusion (SWI), allow us to investigate how the brain resolves conflicting multisensory evidence during perceptual inference in relation to different facets of body representation. In the RHI, synchronous tactile stimulation of a participant's hidden hand and a visible rubber hand creates illusory body ownership; in the SWI, the perceived size of the body can modulate the estimated weight of external objects. According to Bayesian models, such illusions arise as an attempt to explain the causes of multisensory perception and may reflect the attenuation of somatosensory precision, which is required to resolve perceptual hypotheses about conflicting multisensory input. Recent hypotheses propose that the precision of sensorimotor representations is determined by modulators of synaptic gain, like dopamine, acetylcholine, and oxytocin. However, these neuromodulatory hypotheses have not been tested in the context of embodied multisensory integration. The present, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study ( n = 41 healthy volunteers) aimed to investigate the effect of intranasal oxytocin (IN-OT) on multisensory integration processes, tested by means of the RHI and the SWI. Results showed that IN-OT enhanced the subjective feeling of ownership in the RHI, only when synchronous tactile stimulation was involved. Furthermore, IN-OT increased an embodied version of the SWI (quantified as estimation error during a weight estimation task). These findings suggest that oxytocin might modulate processes of visuotactile multisensory integration by increasing the precision of top–down signals against bottom–up sensory input.

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