The Virtual Hand Illusion in Obesity: Dissociation Between Multisensory Interactions Supporting Illusory Experience and Self-Location Recalibration

Abstract The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is used widely to investigate the multisensory integration mechanisms that support bodily self-consciousness and, more specifically, body ownership and self-location. It has been reported that individuals affected by obesity show anomalous multisensory integration processes. We propose that these obesity-induced changes could lead to an unusual susceptibility to the RHI and anomalous bodily self-experience. To test this hypothesis, we administered a modified version of the RHI (using a picture of the participant’s hand) to individuals affected by obesity and participants with a healthy weight. During synchronous and asynchronous stimulation, we compared the subjective experience of the illusion (using a questionnaire) and the effect of the illusion on self-location (i.e., proprioceptive drift). In accordance with the illusion phenomenology, both groups had a comparable subjective illusory experience after the synchronous stimulation. Nevertheless, individuals affected by obesity showed less recalibration of self-location than healthy weight participants. In light of a recent interpretation of the multisensory integration mechanisms that underpin the RHI, our findings suggest that in obesity visuo-tactile integration supporting the subjective experience of the illusion is preserved, whereas visuo-proprioceptive integration for self-location is reduced.

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Multisensory integration in body perception is unaffected by concurrent interoceptive and exteroceptive tasks

Seeing and Perceiving ◽

10.1163/187847612x646550 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 25 (0) ◽

pp. 33

Author(s):

Stefania Cannella ◽

Alessia Folegatti ◽

Massimiliano Zampini ◽

Francesco Pavani

Keyword(s):

Multisensory Integration ◽

Multisensory Processing ◽

Heat Rate ◽

Hand Position ◽

Body Ownership ◽

Body Perception ◽

Attentional Resources ◽

Internal States ◽

Interoceptive Sensitivity ◽

Proprioceptive Drift

A recent study (Tsakiris et al., 2011) suggested that lower interoceptive sensitivity, as assessed by heat-rate estimation, predicts malleability of body representations, as measured by proprioceptive drift and ownership in a rubber hand illusion (RHI) task. The authors suggested that one explanation of their finding is linked to the notion of limited attentional resources: individuals with high interoceptive sensitivity are more aware of internal states and, in turns, they have less attentional resources available for multisensory processing. If this is the case, the competition between interoceptive and multisensory processing should be strongest when they are concurrent. Here we tested this prediction using a visuo-proprioceptive conflict produced through prismatic goggles, without affecting body ownership (unlike the RHI). In three experiments, participants looked at their own hand while wearing neutral or prismatic goggles (visual field shifted 20° leftwards). Meanwhile, they performed a concurrent counting tasks on interoceptive (Exp. 1–2: heart-beats; Exp. 3: breaths) or exteroceptive signals (pure-tones). A no-task condition was also included. We measured proprioceptive drift in each condition an indicator of illusion strength. All experiments documented a significant drift of perceived hand position after prism exposure. This bodily illusion, however, was never affected by the concurrent task, regardless of whether it involved interoceptive or exteroceptive signals. These result reveal that multisensory integration underlying body perception is unaffected by concurrent tasks capturing attentional resources, strongly suggesting a low-level and automatic phenomenon. Furthermore, they indicate that the origin of increased body malleability in individuals with low interoceptive awareness is not competition for attentional resources.

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Higher Emotional Intelligence Is Associated With a Stronger Rubber Hand Illusion

Multisensory Research ◽

10.1163/22134808-00002577 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 30 (7-8) ◽

pp. 615-637 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Olga Perepelkina ◽

Maria Boboleva ◽

Galina Arina ◽

Valentina Nikolaeva

Keyword(s):

Emotional Intelligence ◽

Multisensory Integration ◽

Rubber Hand Illusion ◽

Body Ownership ◽

Rubber Hand ◽

Additional Measure ◽

Related Information ◽

Subjective Reports ◽

Processing Factors ◽

Proprioceptive Drift

The aim of the study was to investigate how emotion information processing factors, such as alexithymia and emotional intelligence, modulate body ownership and influence multisensory integration during the ‘rubber hand illusion’ (RHI) task. It was previously shown that alexithymia correlates with RHI, and we suggested that emotional intelligence should also be a top-down factor of body ownership, since it was not shown in previous experiments. We elaborated the study of Grynberg and Pollatos [Front. Hum. Neurosci.9(2015) 357] with an additional measure of emotional intelligence, and propose an explanation for the interrelation of emotion and body ownership processing. Eighty subjects took part in the RHI experiment and completed the Toronto Alexithymia Scale and the Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). Only MSCEIT was detected to be a significant predictor of the subjective measure of the RHI. There were no significant correlations between alexithymia scores and the test statements of the RHI or the proprioceptive drift, thus we did not replicate the results of Grynberg and Pollatos. However, alexithymia correlated with the control statements of subjective reports of the illusion, which might be explained as a disruption of the ability to discriminate and describe bodily experience. Therefore, (1) alexithymia seems to be connected with difficulties in conscious or verbal processing of body-related information, and (2) higher emotional intelligence might improve multisensory integration of body-related signals and reflect better predictive models of self-processing.

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Order effects in the rubber hand illusion

10.31234/osf.io/amsrp ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Peter Lush

Keyword(s):

Multisensory Integration ◽

Rubber Hand Illusion ◽

Order Effects ◽

Rubber Hand ◽

Demand Characteristics ◽

Test Order ◽

Integration Mechanisms ◽

Synchronous Condition ◽

The Difference ◽

Proprioceptive Drift

Seeing a fake hand brushed in synchrony with brushstrokes to a participant’s hand (the rubber hand illusion; RHI) prompts reports of referred touch, illusory ownership and that the real hand has drifted toward the fake hand (proprioceptive drift). According to one theory, RHI effects are attributable to multisensory integration mechanisms, but they may alternatively (or additionally) reflect the generation of experience to meet expectancies arising from demand characteristics (phenomenological control). Multisensory integration accounts are supported by contrasting synchronous and asynchronous brush stroking conditions, typically presented in counter-balanced order. This contrast is known to be confounded by demand characteristics, but to date there has been no exploration of the role of demand characteristics relating to condition-order. In an exploratory study, existing data from a rubber hand study (n = 124) were analysed to test order effects. Synchronous condition illusion report and the difference between synchronous and asynchronous conditions in both report and proprioceptive drift were greater when the asynchronous condition was performed first (and therefore participants were exposed to the questionnaire materials). These order effects have implications for interpretation of reports of ownership experience: in particular, there was no mean ownership agreement in the synchronous-first group. These data support the theory that reports of ownership of a rubber hand are at least partially attributable to phenomenological control in response to demand characteristics.

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The Role of the Cerebellum in Dynamic Changes of the Sense of Body Ownership: A Study in Patients with Cerebellar Degeneration

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_00522 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 26 (4) ◽

pp. 712-721 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Mirta Fiorio ◽

Caterina Mariotti ◽

Marta Panzeri ◽

Emanuele Antonello ◽

Joseph Classen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Cerebellar Ataxia ◽

Subjective Experience ◽

Premotor Cortex ◽

The Body ◽

Rubber Hand Illusion ◽

Subjective Feeling ◽

Body Ownership ◽

Rubber Hand ◽

Proprioceptive Drift

The sense of the body is deeply rooted in humans, and it can be experimentally manipulated by inducing illusions in at least two aspects: a subjective feeling of ownership and a proprioceptive sense of limb position. Previous studies mapped these different aspects onto anatomically distinct neuronal regions, with the ventral premotor cortex processing subjective experience of ownership and the inferior parietal lobule processing proprioceptive calibration. Lines of evidence suggest an involvement also of the cerebellum, but its precise role is not clear yet. To investigate the contribution of the cerebellum in the sense of body ownership, we applied the rubber-hand illusion paradigm in 28 patients affected by neurodegenerative cerebellar ataxia, selectively involving the cerebellum, and in 26 age-matched control participants. The rubber hand illusion is established by synchronous stroking of the participants' real unseen hand and a visible fake hand. Short asynchronous stroking does not bring about the illusion. We tested the subjective experience of the illusion, evaluated through a questionnaire and the proprioceptive drift of the real unseen hand toward the viewed rubber hand. In patients with cerebellar ataxia, we observed reduced sense of the subjective illusory experience specifically after synchronous stroking. In contrast, the proprioceptive drift was enhanced after synchronous and after asynchronous stimulation. These findings support the contention that the mechanisms underlying the presence of the illusion and the proprioceptive drift may be differently affected in different conditions. Impairment of the subjective sense of the illusion in cerebellar patients might hint at an involvement of cerebellar-premotor networks, whereas the proprioceptive drift typically associated with synchronous stroking appears to rely on other circuits, likely involving the cerebellum and the parietal regions.

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Multisensory integration underlying body-ownership experiences in schizophrenia and offspring of patients: a study using the rubber hand illusion paradigm

Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience ◽

10.1503/jpn.180049 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 44 (3) ◽

pp. 177-184 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Merel Prikken ◽

Anouk van der Weiden ◽

Heleen Baalbergen ◽

Manon H.J. Hillegers ◽

René S. Kahn ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Multisensory Integration ◽

Rubber Hand Illusion ◽

Body Ownership ◽

Rubber Hand

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Perception of visual-tactile asynchrony, bodily perceptual aberrations, and bodily illusions in schizophrenia

10.31234/osf.io/94fg6 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Regine Zopf

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Detection Sensitivity ◽

Body Ownership ◽

Body Perception ◽

Rubber Hand ◽

Bodily Experiences ◽

Asynchrony Detection ◽

Body Perceptions ◽

Proprioceptive Drift ◽

Insight Into

Body perception can be dramatically altered in individuals with schizophrenia resulting in experiences of undefined bodily boundaries, loss of body ownership, and size changes for parts of the body. These individuals may also be more susceptible to the rubber hand illusion (RHI: an illusion of body perception that can also be induced in neurotypical populations), but the findings are mixed. Furthermore, the perception of timing information about multisensory stimuli, which is thought to be fundamental for body perception, has been reported to be altered in schizophrenia. We tested here whether altered perception of the temporal relationship between visual and tactile signals in schizophrenia can predict self-reported perceptual aberrations and RHI susceptibility (indexed by both illusion self-ratings and a more objective proprioceptive-drift measure). We found that the sensitivity to detect temporal asynchronies is reduced in schizophrenia and this predicts bodily perceptual symptoms. In contrast, we found no evidence for a direct relationship between asynchrony detection sensitivity and RHI susceptibility. Instead, our findings suggest that experiencing more bodily perceptual symptoms increases the likelihood of endorsing unusual bodily experiences, resulting in higher RHI self-ratings but not higher proprioceptive-drift scores. Overall, our findings provide evidence for both direct and indirect links between temporal and body perception and thus new insight into the mechanisms that may underlie unusual body perceptions in schizophrenia.

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Awareness and Integration: Understanding the Challenges of Inferring Multisensory Integration Outside of Awareness

10.26686/wgtn.17136149 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Daniel Jenkins

Keyword(s):

Spatial Attention ◽

Multisensory Integration ◽

Subjective Experience ◽

Visual Masking ◽

Target Location ◽

Visual Awareness ◽

Visual Speech ◽

Emotional Prosody ◽

Perceptual Awareness ◽

Spatial Cueing

<p>Multisensory integration describes the cognitive processes by which information from various perceptual domains is combined to create coherent percepts. For consciously aware perception, multisensory integration can be inferred when information in one perceptual domain influences subjective experience in another. Yet the relationship between integration and awareness is not well understood. One current question is whether multisensory integration can occur in the absence of perceptual awareness. Because there is subjective experience for unconscious perception, researchers have had to develop novel tasks to infer integration indirectly. For instance, Palmer and Ramsey (2012) presented auditory recordings of spoken syllables alongside videos of faces speaking either the same or different syllables, while masking the videos to prevent visual awareness. The conjunction of matching voices and faces predicted the location of a subsequent Gabor grating (target) on each trial. Participants indicated the location/orientation of the target more accurately when it appeared in the cued location (80% chance), thus the authors inferred that auditory and visual speech events were integrated in the absence of visual awareness. In this thesis, I investigated whether these findings generalise to the integration of auditory and visual expressions of emotion. In Experiment 1, I presented spatially informative cues in which congruent facial and vocal emotional expressions predicted the target location, with and without visual masking. I found no evidence of spatial cueing in either awareness condition. To investigate the lack of spatial cueing, in Experiment 2, I repeated the task with aware participants only, and had half of those participants explicitly report the emotional prosody. A significant spatial-cueing effect was found only when participants reported emotional prosody, suggesting that audiovisual congruence can cue spatial attention during aware perception. It remains unclear whether audiovisual congruence can cue spatial attention without awareness, and whether such effects genuinely imply multisensory integration.</p>

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EXPRESS: Behavioral evidence of altered sensory attenuation in obesity

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1177/17470218211065766 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 174702182110657

Author(s):

Federica Scarpina ◽

Carlotta Fossataro ◽

Alice Rossi Sebastiano ◽

Francesca Bruni ◽

Massimo Scacchi ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Sense Of Agency ◽

Future Research ◽

Body Ownership ◽

Healthy Weight ◽

Attenuation Effect ◽

Tactile Stimuli ◽

Control Framework ◽

Sensory Attenuation ◽

Behavioral Evidence ◽

Conscious Belief

Body ownership (i.e., the conscious belief of owning a body) and sense of agency (i.e., being the agent of one’s own movements) are part of a pre-reflective experience of bodily self, which grounds on low-level complex sensory–motor processes. While previous literature had already investigated body ownership in obesity, sense of agency was never explored. Here, we exploited the sensory attenuation effect (i.e., an implicit marker of the sense of agency; SA effect) to investigate whether the sense of agency was altered in a sample of eighteen individuals affected by obesity as compared with eighteen healthy-weight individuals. In our experiment, participants were asked to rate the perceived intensity of self-generated and other-generated tactile stimuli. Healthy-weight individuals showed a significantly greater SA effect than participants affected by obesity. Indeed, while healthy-weight participants perceived self-generated stimuli as significantly less intense as compared to externally generated ones, this difference between stimuli was not reported by affected participants. Our results relative to the SA effect pinpointed an altered sense of agency in obesity. We discussed this finding within the motor control framework with reference to obesity. We encouraged future research to further explore such effect and its role in shaping the clinical features of obesity.

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Induced illusory body ownership in borderline personality disorder

Neuroscience of Consciousness ◽

10.1093/nc/niz017 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 2019 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Eli S Neustadter ◽

Sarah K Fineberg ◽

Jacob Leavitt ◽

Meagan M Carr ◽

Philip R Corlett

Keyword(s):

Borderline Personality Disorder ◽

Personality Disorder ◽

Personality Traits ◽

Predictive Coding ◽

Diagnostic Interview ◽

Borderline Personality ◽

Hand Position ◽

Body Ownership ◽

Clinical Literature ◽

Proprioceptive Drift

Abstract One aspect of selfhood that may have relevance for borderline personality disorder (BPD) is variation in sense of body ownership. We employed the rubber hand illusion to manipulate sense of body ownership in BPD. We extended previous research on illusory body ownership in BPD by testing: (i) two illusion conditions: asynchronous and synchronous stimulation, (ii) relationship between illusion experience and BPD symptoms, and (iii) relationship between illusion experience and maladaptive personality traits. We measured illusion strength (questionnaire responses), proprioceptive drift (perceived shift in physical hand position), BPD symptoms (Revised Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines score), and maladaptive personality traits (Personality Inventory for DSM-5) in 24 BPD and 21 control participants. For subjective illusion strength, we found main effects of group (BPD > healthy control, F(1, 43) = 11.94, P = 0.001) and condition (synchronous > asynchronous, F(1, 43) = 22.80, P < 0.001). There was a group × condition interaction for proprioceptive drift (F(1, 43) = 6.48, P = 0.015) such that people with BPD maintained illusion susceptibility in the asynchronous condition. Borderline symptom severity correlated with illusion strength within the BPD group, and this effect was specific to affective (r = 0.45, P < 0.01) and cognitive symptoms (r = 0.46, P < 0.01). Across all participants, trait psychoticism correlated with illusion strength (r = 0.44, P < 0.01). People with BPD are more susceptible to illusory body ownership than controls. This is consistent with the clinical literature describing aberrant physical and emotional experiences of self in BPD. A predictive coding framework holds promise to develop testable mechanistic hypotheses for disrupted bodily self in BPD.

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