Touching a rubber hand: feeling of body ownership is associated with activity in multisensory brain areas

By H. Ehrsson, Nicholas P. Holmes, Richard E. Passingham. Journal of Neuroscience, 2005

744 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the “rubber-hand illusion,” the sight of brushing of a rubber hand at the same time as brushing of the person's own hidden hand is sufficient to produce a feeling of ownership of the fake hand. We shown previously that this illusion is associated with activity in the multisensory areas, most notably the ventral premotor cortex (Ehrsson et al., 2004). However, it remains to be demonstrated that this illusion does not simply reflect the dominant role of vision and that the premotor activity does not reflect a visual representation of an object near the hand. To address these issues, we introduce a somatic rubber-hand illusion. The experimenter moved the blindfolded participant's left index finger so that it touched the fake hand, and simultaneously, he touched the participant's real right hand, synchronizing the touches as perfectly as possible. After ∼9.7 s, this stimulation elicited an illusion that one was touching one's own hand. We scanned brain activity during this illusion and two control conditions, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Activity in the ventral premotor cortices, intraparietal cortices, and the cerebellum was associated with the illusion of touching one's own hand. Furthermore, the rated strength of the illusion correlated with the degree of premotor and cerebellar activity. This finding suggests that the activity in these areas reflects the detection of congruent multisensory signals from one's own body, rather than of visual representations. We propose that this could be the mechanism for the feeling of body ownership.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/71e433340f2c7005413651d3148be798db3346ae

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Citations in the corpus

The neural basis of visual body perception (2007, background): “Neuroimaging studies have linked cerebellar, parietal, premotor and frontal opercular areas with this illusion, and the premotor and frontal areas in particular with the sense of ownershi”
Neural signatures of body ownership: a sensory network for bodily self-consciousness. (2007, background): “First, integration of correlated synchronous visual and tactile stimulation is a necessary condition for the RHI to occur (Botvinick and Cohen 1998; Ehrsson et al. 2004; Tsakiris and Haggard 2005b).”
Moving a Rubber Hand that Feels Like Your Own: A Dissociation of Ownership and Agency (2012, positive): “This interpretation is consistent with the finding that the rubber hand illusion can be elicited in blindfolded participants (by having them touch a rubber right hand with their left index finger in synchrony with touches applied to their own right hand; Ehrsson et al., 2005) or when the cutaneous i”
What is embodiment? A psychometric approach. (2008, positive): “The rubber hand illusion provides one of the few means of manipulating embodiment, and has been so used in a number of recent studies (Armel & Ramachandran, 2003; Austen, Soto-Faraco, Enns, & Kingstone, 2004; Costantini & Haggard, 2007; Durgin, Evans, Dunphy, Klostermann, & Simmons, 2007; Ehrsson, ”
Towards a Digital Body: The Virtual Arm Illusion (2008, background): “Neurons in multisensory areas that integrate this information could implement the necessary neuronal computations causing changes in body ownership (Ehrsson et al., 2004, 2005).”
My body in the brain: a neurocognitive model of body-ownership. (2010, positive): “Converging evidence from RHI studies (Costanini & Haggard, 2007; Lloyd, 2007; Ehrsson et al., 2004; Pavani et al., 2000; Tsakiris & Haggard, 2005), studies on visuo-tactile extinction on neuropsychological patients (di Pellegrino, Ladavas, & Farne, 1997; Farne, Dematte, & Ladavas, 2005; Ladavas, di…”
MSc Thesis (2011, background): “Although 80% of participants report the RHI within the first 15 seconds of tactile stimulation [18], [19], [20], for some people it can take up to 2.”
Inducing Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Body (2009, background): “…identifying activity in multisensory areas, such as areas in the intraparietal sulcus and the ventral premotor cortex, associated with the illusion (Ehrsson et al., 2004, 2005, 2007) an activity that was greater when the rubber arm was aligned in parallel with the real hand (Ehrsson et al., 2004).”
Multimodal contributions to body representation (2016, background): “The critical role of inputs from the different senses to this illusion is supported by neuroimaging studies in humans in which activity in multisensory brain areas has been found to be associated with the illusion (Ehrsson et al., 2004, 2005; Tsakiris et al., 2007).”
Neural bases of the bodily self as revealed by electrical brain stimulation: A systematic review (2023, background): “…2002), whereas experimentally-induced changes in the perceptual body image (perceived shape and size or posture of the body) have been related to the postcentral sulcus, intraparietal sulcus, insula, and inferior parietal lobule (Ehrsson et al., 2005; Kavounoudias et al., 2008; Naito et al., 2017).”