scholarly journals Salivary Oxytocin Concentration Associates with the Subjective Feeling of Body Ownership during the Rubber Hand Illusion

Author(s):  
Masakazu Ide ◽  
Makoto Wada
2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Letizia Della Longa ◽  
Giovanni Mento ◽  
Teresa Farroni

During childhood, the body undergoes rapid changes suggesting the need to constantly update body representation based on the integration of multisensory signals. Sensory experiences in critical periods of early development may have a significant impact on the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning the development of the sense of one’s own body. Specifically, preterm children are at risk for sensory processing difficulties, which may lead to specific vulnerability in binding together sensory information in order to modulate the representation of the bodily self. The present study aims to investigate the malleability of body ownership in preterm (N = 21) and full-term (N = 19) school-age children, as reflected by sensitivity to the Rubber Hand Illusion. The results revealed that multisensory processes underlying the ability to identify a rubber hand as being part of one’s own body are already established in childhood, as indicated by a higher subjective feeling of embodiment over the rubber hand during synchronous visual-tactile stimulation. Notably, the effect of visual-tactile synchrony was related to the suppression of the alpha band oscillations over frontal, central, and parietal scalp regions, possibly indicating a greater activation of somatosensory and associative areas underpinning the illusory body ownership. Moreover, an interaction effect between visual-tactile condition and group emerged, suggesting that preterm children showed a greater suppression of alpha oscillatory activity during the illusion. This result together with lower scores of subjective embodiment over the rubber hand reported by preterm children indicate that preterm birth may affect the development of the flexible representation of the body. These findings provide an essential contribution to better understand the processes of identification and differentiation of the bodily self from the external environment, in both full-term and preterm children, paving the way for a multisensory and embodied approach to the investigation of social and cognitive development.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 712-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirta Fiorio ◽  
Caterina Mariotti ◽  
Marta Panzeri ◽  
Emanuele Antonello ◽  
Joseph Classen ◽  
...  

The sense of the body is deeply rooted in humans, and it can be experimentally manipulated by inducing illusions in at least two aspects: a subjective feeling of ownership and a proprioceptive sense of limb position. Previous studies mapped these different aspects onto anatomically distinct neuronal regions, with the ventral premotor cortex processing subjective experience of ownership and the inferior parietal lobule processing proprioceptive calibration. Lines of evidence suggest an involvement also of the cerebellum, but its precise role is not clear yet. To investigate the contribution of the cerebellum in the sense of body ownership, we applied the rubber-hand illusion paradigm in 28 patients affected by neurodegenerative cerebellar ataxia, selectively involving the cerebellum, and in 26 age-matched control participants. The rubber hand illusion is established by synchronous stroking of the participants' real unseen hand and a visible fake hand. Short asynchronous stroking does not bring about the illusion. We tested the subjective experience of the illusion, evaluated through a questionnaire and the proprioceptive drift of the real unseen hand toward the viewed rubber hand. In patients with cerebellar ataxia, we observed reduced sense of the subjective illusory experience specifically after synchronous stroking. In contrast, the proprioceptive drift was enhanced after synchronous and after asynchronous stimulation. These findings support the contention that the mechanisms underlying the presence of the illusion and the proprioceptive drift may be differently affected in different conditions. Impairment of the subjective sense of the illusion in cerebellar patients might hint at an involvement of cerebellar-premotor networks, whereas the proprioceptive drift typically associated with synchronous stroking appears to rely on other circuits, likely involving the cerebellum and the parietal regions.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. e0207528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela Marotta ◽  
Massimiliano Zampini ◽  
Michele Tinazzi ◽  
Mirta Fiorio

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merel Prikken ◽  
Anouk van der Weiden ◽  
Heleen Baalbergen ◽  
Manon H.J. Hillegers ◽  
René S. Kahn ◽  
...  

Cortex ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 104 ◽  
pp. 180-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Crucianelli ◽  
Charlotte Krahé ◽  
Paul M. Jenkinson ◽  
Aikaterini (Katerina) Fotopoulou

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas P. Holmes ◽  
Tamar R. Makin ◽  
Michelle Cadieux ◽  
Claire Williams ◽  
Katherine R. Naish ◽  
...  

The rubber hand illusion (RHI) is a multisensory (visual, tactile, proprioceptive) illusion in which participants report body ownership over, mislocalize actual hand position to, and feel touches applied to, the rubber hand. For many years, researchers have used changes in perceived hand position, measured by inter-manual pointing, as a more objective measure of the illusion than verbal reports alone. Despite this reliance, there is little evidence to show that the illusion of hand ownership is directly related to perceived hand position. We developed an adaptive staircase procedure to measure perceived hand position, and tested whether the RHI affected perceived hand position. In two experiments we found a significant illusion of ownership, as well as significant changes in perceived hand position, but these two measures were uncorrelated. In a third experiment using more typical RHI procedures, we again replicated significant illusions of ownership and changes in hand position, but again the measures were uncorrelated. We conclude that viewing and feeling touches applied to a dummy hand results in clear illusions of ownership and changes in hand position, but via independent mechanisms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 537-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Campos ◽  
Graziella El-Khechen Richandi ◽  
Babak Taati ◽  
Behrang Keshavarz

Percepts about our body’s position in space and about body ownership are informed by multisensory feedback from visual, proprioceptive, and tactile inputs. The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is a multisensory illusion that is induced when an observer sees a rubber hand being stroked while they feel their own, spatially displaced, and obstructed hand being stroked. When temporally synchronous, the visual–tactile interactions can create the illusion that the rubber hand belongs to the observer and that the observer’s real hand is shifted in position towards the rubber hand. Importantly, little is understood about whether these multisensory perceptions of the body change with older age. Thus, in this study we implemented a classic RHI protocol (synchronous versus asynchronous stroking) with healthy younger (18–35) and older (65+) adults and measured the magnitude of proprioceptive drift and the subjective experience of body ownership. As an adjunctive objective measure, skin temperature was recorded to evaluate whether decreases in skin temperature were associated with illusory percepts, as has been shown previously. The RHI was observed for both age groups with respect to increased drift and higher ratings of ownership following synchronous compared to asynchronous stroking. Importantly, no effects of age and no interactions between age and condition were observed for either of these outcome measures. No effects were observed for skin temperature. Overall, these results contribute to an emerging field of research investigating the conditions under which age-related differences in multisensory integration are observed by providing insights into the role of visual, proprioceptive, and tactile inputs on bodily percepts.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 330-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Nava ◽  
Nadia Bolognini ◽  
Chiara Turati

In this study, we investigated the contribution of tactile and proprioceptive cues to the development of the sense of body ownership by testing the susceptibility of 4- to 5-year-old children, 8- to 9-year-old children, and adults to the somatic rubber-hand illusion (SRHI). We found that feelings of owning a rubber hand in the SHRI paradigm, as assessed by explicit reports (i.e., questionnaire), are already present by age 4 and do not change throughout development. In contrast, the effect of the illusion on the sense of hand position, as assessed by a pointing task, was present only in 8- to 9-year-old children and adults; the magnitude of such capture increased with age. Our findings reveal that tactile-proprioceptive interactions contributed differently to the two aspects characterizing the SRHI: Although the contribution of such interactions to an explicit sense of self was similar across age groups, their contribution to the more implicit recalibration of hand position is still developing by age 9.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Laura Filippetti ◽  
Louise P. Kirsch ◽  
Laura Crucianelli ◽  
Aikaterini Fotopoulou

AbstractOur sense of body ownership relies on integrating different sensations according to their temporal and spatial congruency. Nevertheless, there is ongoing controversy about the role of affective congruency during multisensory integration, i.e. whether the stimuli to be perceived by the different sensory channels are congruent or incongruent in terms of their affective quality. In the present study, we applied a widely used multisensory integration paradigm, the Rubber Hand Illusion, to investigate the role of affective, top-down aspects of sensory congruency between visual and tactile modalities in the sense of body ownership. In Experiment 1 (N = 36), we touched participants with either soft or rough fabrics in their unseen hand, while they watched a rubber hand been touched synchronously with the same fabric or with a ‘hidden’ fabric of ‘uncertain roughness’. In Experiment 2 (N = 50), we used the same paradigm as in Experiment 1, but replaced the ‘uncertainty’ condition with an ‘incongruent’ one, in which participants saw the rubber hand being touched with a fabric of incongruent roughness and hence opposite valence. We found that certainty (Experiment 1) and congruency (Experiment 2) between the felt and vicariously perceived tactile affectivity led to higher subjective embodiment compared to uncertainty and incongruency, respectively, irrespective of any valence effect. Our results suggest that congruency in the affective top-down aspects of sensory stimulation is important to the multisensory integration process leading to embodiment, over and above temporal and spatial properties.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chenggui Fan ◽  
H. Henrik Ehrsson

A controversial and unresolved issue in cognitive neuroscience is whether humans can experience supernumerary limbs as part of their own body. Some previous experiments have claimed that it is possible to elicit supernumerary hand illusions based on modified versions of the rubber hand illusion. However, other studies have provided conflicting results that suggest that only one rubber hand can be perceived as one’s own. To address this issue, we developed a supernumerary hand illusion paradigm that allowed us to disambiguate ownership of individual rubber hands from simultaneous ownership of two fake hands. In our setup, the participant’s real right hand was hidden under a platform, while two identical right rubber hands were placed in parallel on top of the platform in direct view of the participant. We applied synchronous strokes to both rubber hands and the real hand (SS), synchronous strokes to one rubber hand and the real hand and asynchronous strokes to the other model hand (AS and SA) or asynchronous strokes to both fake hands in relation to the real hand (AA). Our results demonstrate that a genuine illusion of owning two rubber hands can be elicited and that such a supernumerary hand illusion can be isolated from the sense of ownership of a single rubber hand both in terms of questionnaire ratings and threat-evoked skin conductance responses (SCRs). These findings advance our knowledge about the dynamic flexibility and fundamental constraints of body representation and emphasize the importance of correlated afferent signals for causal inference in body ownership.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document