The rubber hand illusion revisited: visuotactile integration and self-attribution.
Watching a rubber hand being stroked, while one's own unseen hand is synchronously stroked, may cause the rubber hand to be attributed to one's own body, to "feel like it's my hand." A behavioral measure of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) is a drift of the perceived position of one's own hand toward the rubber hand. The authors investigated (a) the influence of general body scheme representations on the RHI in Experiments 1 and 2 and (b) the necessary conditions of visuotactile stimulation underlying the RHI in Experiments 3 and 4. Overall, the results suggest that at the level of the process underlying the build up of the RHI, bottom-up processes of visuotactile correlation drive the illusion as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. Conversely, at the level of the phenomenological content, the illusion is modulated by top-down influences originating from the representation of one's own body.
Tsakiris
Manos
M
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Department of Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom. e.tsakiris@ucl.ac.uk
Haggard
Patrick
P
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009903:Optical Illusions; D011434:Proprioception / Q000502:physiology; D012649:Self Concept; D014110:Touch; D014796:Visual Perception