Moving a Rubber Hand that Feels Like Your Own: A Dissociation of Ownership and Agency

By Andreas Kalckert, H. Ehrsson. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012

652 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During voluntary hand movement, we sense that we generate the movement and that the hand is a part of our body. These feelings of control over bodily actions, or the sense of agency, and the ownership of body parts are two fundamental aspects of the way we consciously experience our bodies. However, little is known about how these processes are functionally linked. Here, we introduce a version of the rubber hand illusion in which participants control the movements of the index finger of a model hand, which is in full view, by moving their own right index finger. We demonstrated that voluntary finger movements elicit a robust illusion of owning the rubber hand and that the senses of ownership and agency over the model hand can be dissociated. We systematically varied the relative timing of the finger movements (synchronous versus asynchronous), the mode of movement (active versus passive), and the position of the model hand (anatomically congruent versus incongruent positions). Importantly, asynchrony eliminated both ownership and agency, passive movements abolished the sense of agency but left ownership intact, and incongruent positioning of the model hand diminished ownership but did not eliminate agency. These findings provide evidence for a double dissociation of ownership and agency, suggesting that they represent distinct cognitive processes. Interestingly, we also noted that the sense of agency was stronger when the hand was perceived to be a part of the body, and only in this condition did we observe a significant correlation between the subjects’ ratings of agency and ownership. We discuss this in the context of possible differences between agency over owned body parts and agency over actions that involve interactions with external objects. In summary, the results obtained in this study using a simple moving rubber hand illusion paradigm extend previous findings on the experience of ownership and agency and shed new light on their relationship.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Sociology and Political Science, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/023b2be63f707578d8739cd85e641c512ff2670c

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Citations in the corpus

A model of acceptance of augmented-reality interactive technology: the moderating role of cognitive innovativeness (2014, methodology): “The 3D visuotactile can be synchronously paired with haptic imagery that simulates real touch in creating an effect of having control of the real object, to successfully shape ARIT’s sense of body ownership and ownership control [34,54,64,67].”
The building blocks of the full body ownership illusion (2013, background): “However, it has been shown that the illusion is also experienced when visuotactile stimulation is substituted by other modalities of multisensory and/or sensorimotor stimulation, e.g., with sensorimotor contingencies in active or passive movements (Tsakiris et al., 2006; Kalckert and Ehrsson, 2012).”
The Sense of Embodiment in Virtual Reality (2012, neutral): “In line with this, in the experiment of Kalckert and Ehrsson (2012), ownership and agency were found to be double dissociated.”
The Impact of Avatar Personalization and Immersion on Virtual Body Ownership, Presence, and Emotional Response (2018, background): “Subjective agency, adapted from [20]: “To what extent do you have the feeling that the virtual body moves just like you want it to, as if it is obeying your will?””
Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play (2013, background): “In general, numerous studies in cognitive neuroscience and psychology have demonstrated that a fake body-part or a fake body can be illusorily experienced as the real body-part or the real body respectively, when the fake and real both receive spatiotemporally congruent multisensory and/or sensorimo”