The role of agency for perceived ownership in the virtual hand illusion

• Published in: Consciousness and cognition Vol. 36; pp. 277 - 288
• Main Authors: Ma, Ke, Hommel, Bernhard
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.11.2015; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Active operated; Adult; Awareness - physiology; Body awareness; Body ownership; Cognition & reasoning; Female; Galvanic Skin Response; Hand; Hands; Humans; Illusions - physiology; Male; Non-corporeal; Perceptions; Proprioception - physiology; Rubber hand illusion; Self Concept; Sense of agency; Touch Perception - physiology; Virtual hand illusion; Virtual reality; Visual Perception - physiology; Young Adult; Non-corporeal; Body ownership; Virtual hand illusion; Active operated; Rubber hand illusion; Body awareness; Sense of agency
• ISSN: 1053-8100; 1090-2376
• DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2015.07.008

•We show that agency contributes to self-perception and ownership.•We directly compare a static rubber-hand setup with a dynamic virtual-hand setup.•We directly compare effectors with different degrees of similarity to real hands.•We show that agency and similarity can to some degree compensate for each other. The rubber hand illusion shows that people can perceive artificial effectors as part of their own body under suitable conditions, and the virtual hand illusion shows the same for virtual effectors. In this study, we compared a virtual version of the rubber-hand setup with a virtual-hand setup, and manipulated the synchrony between stimulation or movement of a virtual “effector” and stimulation or movement of people’s own hand, the similarity between virtual effector and people’s own hand, and the degree of agency (the degree to which the virtual effector could be controlled by people’s own movements). Synchrony-induced ownership illusion was strongly affected by agency but not similarity, which is inconsistent with top-down modulation approaches but consistent with bottom-up approaches to ownership. However, both agency and similarity induce a general bias towards perceiving an object as part of one’s body, suggesting that ownership judgments integrate various sources of information.