Achronopresence: how temporal visuotactile and visuomotor mismatches modulate embodiment

The loss of body ownership, the feeling that your body and its limbs no longer belong to you, presents a severe clinical condition that has proven difficult to study directly. We here propose a novel paradigm using mixed reality to interfere with natural embodiment using temporally conflicting sensory signals from the own hand. In Experiment 1 we investigated how such a mismatch affects phenomenological and physiological aspects of embodiment, and identified its most important dimensions using a principle component analysis. The results suggest that such a mismatch induces a strong reduction in embodiment accompanied by an increase in feelings of disownership and deafference, which was, however, not reflected in physiological changes. In Experiment 2 we refined the paradigm to measure perceptual thresholds for temporal mismatches and compared how different multimodal, mismatching information alters the sense of embodiment. The results showed that while visual delay decreased embodiment both while actively moving and during passive touch, the effect was stronger for the former. Our results extend previous findings as they demonstrate that a sense of disembodiment can be induced through controlled multimodal mismatches about one’s own body and more so during active movement as compared to passive touch. Based on the ecologically more valid protocol we propose here, we argue that such a sense of disembodiment may fundamentally differ from disownership sensations as discussed in the rubber hand illusion literature, and emphasize its clinical relevance. This might importantly advance the current debate on the relative contribution of different modalities to our sense of body and its plasticity.