title: Over my fake body: body ownership illusions for studying the multisensory basis of own-body perception.
abstract: Which is my body and how do I distinguish it from the bodies of others, or from objects in the surrounding environment? The perception of our own body and more particularly our sense of body ownership is taken for granted. Nevertheless, experimental findings from body ownership illusions (BOIs), show that under specific multisensory conditions, we can experience artificial body parts or fake bodies as our own body parts or body, respectively. The aim of the present paper is to discuss how and why BOIs are induced. We review several experimental findings concerning the spatial, temporal, and semantic principles of crossmodal stimuli that have been applied to induce BOIs. On the basis of these principles, we discuss theoretical approaches concerning the underlying mechanism of BOIs. We propose a conceptualization based on Bayesian causal inference for addressing how our nervous system could infer whether an object belongs to our own body, using multisensory, sensorimotor, and semantic information, and we discuss how this can account for several experimental findings. Finally, we point to neural network models as an implementational framework within which the computational problem behind BOIs could be addressed in the future.
authors: Event Lab, Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ; IR3C Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Konstantina
authors: K
authors: Kilteni
authors: Event Lab, Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Antonella
authors: A
authors: Maselli
authors: Sensory Motor Performance Program, Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL, USA ; Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA ; Department of Physiology, Northwestern University Chicago, IL, USA.
authors: Konrad P
authors: KP
authors: Kording
authors: Event Lab, Department of Personality, Evaluation and Psychological Treatment, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ; IR3C Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, University of Barcelona Barcelona, Spain ; Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Passeig Lluís Companys 23 Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Mel
authors: M
authors: Slater
keywords: body ownership; body semantics; causal inference; multisensory perception; rubber hand illusion