Which hand is mine? Discriminating body ownership perception in a two-alternative forced-choice task
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Which hand is mine? Discriminating body ownership perception in a two-alternative forced-choice task Marie Chancel 1
&
H. Henrik Ehrsson 1
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The experience of one’s body as one’s own is referred to as the sense of body ownership. This central part of human conscious experience determines the boundary between the self and the external environment, a crucial distinction in perception, action, and cognition. Although body ownership is known to involve the integration of signals from multiple sensory modalities, including vision, touch, and proprioception, little is known about the principles that determine this integration process, and the relationship between body ownership and perception is unclear. These uncertainties stem from the lack of a sensitive and rigorous method to quantify body ownership. Here, we describe a two-alternative forced-choice discrimination task that allows precise and direct measurement of body ownership as participants decide which of two rubber hands feels more like their own in a version of the rubber hand illusion. In two experiments, we show that the temporal and spatial congruence principles of multisensory stimulation, which determine ownership discrimination, impose tighter constraints than previously thought and that texture congruence constitutes an additional principle; these findings are compatible with theoretical models of multisensory integration. Taken together, our results suggest that body ownership constitutes a genuine perceptual multisensory phenomenon that can be quantified with psychophysics in discrimination experiments. Keywords Body ownership . Multisensory integration . Psychophysics . Rubber hand illusion . Body perception . Self-attribution
One’s body is the most important object in one’s life, serving as the essential medium through which one experiences the world and interacts with others and with one’s environment. Perceiving what constitutes this body (i.e., which objects are parts of one’s body and which are not) is therefore of crucial importance for the ability to act upon one’s surroundings as well as to protect one’s physical integrity. The experience of the body as one’s own is referred to as the sense (or feeling) of “body ownership” (Ehrsson, 2012). This experience includes the phenomenological quality that a body part is part of one’s body (Martin, 1995) and subjective awareness of a limb or the whole body as one’s own (Gallagher, 2000; Gallagher & Daly, 2018). As such, body ownership constitutes a
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02107-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Marie Chancel [email protected] 1
Department of Neuroscience, Brain, Body and Self Laboratory, Karolinska Institute, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden
fundamental component of self-awareness, a fact that has intrigued both scientists and philosophers (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). The complexity and the importance of body ownership have also been h
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