title: Body-ownership for actively operated non-corporeal objects.
abstract: Rubber-hand and virtual-hand illusions show that people can perceive body ownership for objects under suitable conditions. Bottom-up approaches assume that perceived ownership emerges from multisensory matching (e.g., between seen object and felt hand movements), whereas top-down approaches claim that novel body parts are integrated only if they resemble some part of a permanent internal body representation. We demonstrate that healthy adults perceive body ownership for a virtual balloon changing in size, and a virtual square changing in size or color, in synchrony with movements of their real hand. This finding is inconsistent with top-down approaches and amounts to an existence proof that non-corporeal events can be perceived as body parts if their changes are systematically related to one's actions. It also implies that previous studies with passive-stimulation techniques might have underestimated the plasticity of body representations and put too much emphasis on the resemblance between viewed object and real hand.
authors.affiliation: Leiden University, Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands. Electronic address: k.ma@fsw.leidenuniv.nl.
authors.forename: Ke
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: Leiden University, Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Bernhard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hommel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001828:Body Image; D005260:Female; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D055698:Touch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Body ownership; Non-corporeal object; Rubber hand illusion; Sense of agency; Virtual hand illusion